Jardin D'Evelyne

pre meditations on writing, part 1

2005-12-19T12:36:00.000-05:00

It's come to my attention that I don't really write like most people with literary aspirations. One part of that may be that I tend to have inconsistencies that I haven't worked my way through yet. And that's just because I need to get my head screwed on straight.

But the second part is that I feel like there's a, well, let's call it "fashionable aesthetic" of realistic fiction. The way most people seem to understand fiction is that it is a creation of characters that could be real, and whose fates clarify some point of human existence. Within this realm there are all sorts of tones, styles, and characters, but one of the popular approaches is to take a disaffected/unengaged tone and talk about a character whose life is decadent and morally questionable. Kind of a "jaded observer" pose. A lot of college kids seem to like this pose because it allows them to appear "racy." Oh look, I can write about these things like they're normal, the message seems to be. That's why I'm cool.

The opposite end of the spectrum would be a "compassionate observer" pose, where the characters are somewhat bumblers, but the narrator forgives them because their faults are somehow loveable as human traits. Lorrie Moore seems to do this a lot, especially when she did a reading for us at Yale. It's hard to explain, but this is approach also strikes me a bit cold. I guess the "compassion" can easily become sappy if the reader doesn't agree. It's like how Dostoyevsky makes all these ethical comments all the time, and it sometimes seems extraneous. Except in the current trends, it's more an attitude thing than actual paragraphs of morality.

What do I find wrong with all this? Nothing, except that when I sit down to write, I don't feel these things coming to me. And I wonder why everyone seems to think this way. First of all, to me, a story only stays interesting if it is slightly strange. (People who know me will probably start nodding at this point!) Not only slightly strange, but it has to somehow give off an aura of being real and not real at the same time. It has to be that I'm telling you a story, and it also has to be that you believe me, at least a little bit. The story also cannot be just about people who live pointless lives. Pointlessness is not a point. Stories have to have magic--and I mean that figuratively.

Secondly, I don't like how everyone tries to be detached all the time. There's something to be said for being an observer, but there's something cold about it, too. People just don't seem to think writing emotionally charged sentences is a virtue. It's too sentimental, or something. Of course, it doesn't do to be sappy or moralistic, as I mentioned before. But whenever I start writing in a more passionate vein, I feel unwillingly funneled towards some sort of "asian american" or "women's" literature that I don't feel like I necessary belong to. Like I'm not going to be taken seriously, because I don't want to write in a detached, witty tone. This IS serious, dammit. Living in this world, seeing it for real, is a serious thing. Authentic emotions are just as important as big ideas.

The AA/women writers/Amy Tan complex brings me to another thing: geography. I can never decide whether or not to give my characters a time and a place. Because if I had my pick, my characters might live in any of the countries I've ever been in, and then they would be "exotic" when I just want them to be generally human. And it just might get political, depending on which countries they live in...why is it that only literature that takes place in America seem to have that aura of "American literature"? And everything else has a different label? To someone living in Indiana, a story taking place in New York City might be set in almost as foreign a place as Tokyo (two cities that give me the impression of having similar feel). It's like how in movies the "white people" are simply normal, whereas anyone of a different race is "ethnic" simply by virtue of the fact that they don't show up very often.

This has turned into a rough expose on what I think about writing at this moment...which is funny because instead of writing something, I decided to write ABOUT it in a xanga entry. But I've been thinking lately about why I want to write. Probably these ideas need to stew for a while longer before I can boil them down to what I really think. If I can ever do that, it'll help me screw my head on straight(er).

all ye need to know

2005-12-05T10:37:00.000-05:00

There is a man named Hiroshi Sugimoto who takes pictures. When he takes pictures, he isn't trying to get his subject in focus, or catch the right moment of action, or remember his life. In fact, most of his subjects are not alive. He has no conventional sense of focus. And most of his pictures take you beyond a moment, into an experience of viewing where you are forced to think, instead, about infiinity.

For example, he took a stroll at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. It was the seventies, and he was a budding art student with time on his hands. All of a sudden, he starts taking pictures of the clunky dioramas in the museum. People must have thought he was out of his mind. What were they worth to him? Was he planning creating his own waxen menagerie? Was he actually crazy? Or was he being facetious?

In fact, he had made an interesting discovery. These gaudy dioramas of prehistoric times and stuffed animals were worth nothing to the average person. They were not beautiful. They were hardly useful, because they did not make us feel anything more than perhaps a slight embarrassment at the audacity of their ugliness, the seemingly honest attempt to educate. But in his lense, in black and white, they suddenly became almost real. They came to us, not from the time they were made--probably a few decades past--but from ten thousand years ago, from the jungles, from the seas, from the ends of the earth. You know, to look at the photos, that they must be false. But you have to catch your breath, because faced with that tremendous print, that quiet touch of realist art, you see something you shouldn't see. You see past time and space, and step onto a plane with people that do not exist, things you cannot know.

This is what they mean when they say that Hiroshi Sugimoto is an artist. He is a conscious appropriator--a photographer who knows his Marcel Duchamp--a meticulous craftsman, a cynic, a joker, a man.

For my part, the most moving part of the retrospective exhibit I went to was the seascape section. The seascapes were taken of various seas and oceans around the world at various times of day, spanning a range of meteorlogical conditions. Here's the catch: you can't tell one from another. There are no distinguishing geographical characteristics. You are faced with the sea itself and its sky. Sometimes you cannot tell one from the other, but you can see, strangely, the ripples on the surface of the water with extreme clarity. Looking upon them, standing stock still, a rocking began beneath my feet, and I could hardly stand still. In the low light I was there--in the ocean, nothing in my eye's reach except for the sea that was beckoning me into unmeasured distances.

And so it is possible to forget time. To forget it, and in the same thought realize how impossibly small you are within time, because you still think in seconds, in moments that disappear without a trace like tears in that ocean.

There were other series as well that moved me, such as the architecture series--capturing world famous buildings in a blurry focus so that they stand out as they must have in the architect's mind, or as they would in our collective consciousness if they ever were to disappear. The eery thing about this series is that one of the buildings is, if you already guessed it, the twin towers. The theater series that are so iconic of his work are also amazing in their obsessive detail and their creation of time in a frame of photography.

If only...if only I could do that. If only I could write something so fine, so out of time, so incredibly real that a reader sees beyond this world, and must shift the stance of her legs to stay standing on a suddenly wobbly earth.

http://www.artnet.com/artist/16261/hiroshi-sugimoto.html

KouYuu season in Japan

2005-11-27T13:26:00.000-05:00

Autumn in Kyoto1 157
Originally uploaded by amethystjazz.

come see my other pictures!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/80444335@N00/sets/1457632/

Introduction to Creative Writing: the Japan Chapter

2005-11-09T10:59:00.000-05:00

Since I'm in Japan:

雲の尻尾　流れてしまう　前のこと　残してる葉に　最後同情
kumo no sippo
nagaretesimau
mae no koto
nokositeru ha ni
saigo doujyou

Last thing before the tail of the cloud
drains away: compassion
for those left behind
leaves.

*****************************************

峡谷と　満月別れ　カラス鳴き
kyoutani to
mangetu wakare
karasu naki

the parting of the gorge
and the full moon:
black crow cry.

2005-10-21T13:06:00.000-05:00

First print.

Smoke

2005-10-17T18:04:00.000-05:00

I smell like smoke.

I spent Sunday wandering a place in Nagoya called Osu Kannon with my camera. To give you the short version, it's this huge covered shopping area that grew out of the area close to Osu Kannon temple (大須觀音). Kannon, the buddha who "watches sound," who listens to the myriad prayers, and who has been painted not only with a thousand eyes but a thousand arms, so that she can reach into world. I only had only one eye--that is, a "one-eye camera," as they call SLRs in Japan, and two hands to catch the bounty of the day.It was festival day in Osu.

Let me explain that I am no artist. I've never aken more than 3 rolls of black and white pictures in my life. But black and white is the only medium I can use, because that's the only type of film I can develop in the dark room. So there I was, walking the twisty pathways of Osu Kannon, along with half of Nagoya. There were street performers set up everywhere, including a "pro wrestling" performance, belly dancing, and an inexplicable dance of ecstatic gold-painted people leaping about to music; geisha parading, walking pigeon-toed and silent on 5 inch platform shoes; and a temple drama of a man being swallowed by a spirit with a black gelatinous body, ala Spirited Away. I wasn't able to take pictures of the smell of yakitori (teriyaki chicken on a stick) and other food cooking at vending stands in the open air.

But I did take several pictures of parents with their children. I've been wondering for a long time how photographers manage to take pictures of people without getting strange stares. Well, I got some stares, but I got away with a lot more than I thought I could, dashing in and out of the crowd. And children were the least likely to look back at me in fear. They were mostly too caught up experiencing one of the most raucous displays of pied beauty in their young lives.

I also spent some time taking pictures of alleyways. The contrast between the light of the lit, festival walkway and the darkness of the alley receding into real life was fascinating. I took one of these lifelines down to a Taiwanese food bar--with a line going down the block, no less--playing Jolin Tsai's music. Yuck. Of course, I took a picture. But it's in black and white, so you can't see the garish bright orange that they chose for the sign. Just the people drawn to the glow of florescents like mosquitoes to the zapper.

Resolved: I like traveling with a camera. The risks and the stares. The colors and people you would never think to see. The smoke that still clings to my shirt like to the sides of the red paper lanterns in Osu Kannon, silently and without my notice until I put away my camera and see again with two eyes.

Place Taiwan in the Right Hands: Its Own (Full Version; see link for published version)

2005-04-28T06:52:00.000-05:00

If you say something often enough and loud enough, does it become true?

The National People’s Congress of China ratified the Anti-Secession Law on March 14. All 2896 members of that legislative body voted unanimously for the law, which states that Taiwan is a part of China, and that any motion towards “secession” would be grounds for the employment of “non-peaceful means.”

The ten articles of the “law,” its writers, and those who ratified it are entertaining a blissful delusion. A law is only functional—only legitimate—if it addresses its real constituency. By claiming loudly in international circles that the cross-strait situation is a domestic squabble, China would like to make a wish into a reality. It tries to do so by sheer force: it blocks Taiwan from the U.N. and U.N. related bodies such as the W.H.O.; it bullies the world into calling Taiwanese athletes representatives of “Chinese Taipei,” and it will not tolerate anything other than its version of the story.

The Anti-Secession Law is only the latest reiteration of that tired old tale, a tale that does not conform with the political reality in Taiwan.

The Anti-Secession Law says: “The state protects the rights and interests of the Taiwan compatriots in accordance with law.” There can be no law if the target population of such law has not agreed to a social contract with that law. Only 5% of the Taiwan population is in favor of the Anti-Secession Law, according to a recent poll by a Taiwanese news agency (TVBS News). The other 95% have expressed no wish to be “protected” by the law of China, especially if this consists of “protection” from basic democratic liberties.

The Anti-Secession Law says: “Safeguarding China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is the common obligation of all Chinese people, the Taiwan compatriots included.” There has been no such integrity and no such common obligation for two, almost three generations. The two entities that administer law upon the territory of Taiwan and the territory of China respectively have not had direct communication in 57 years. Furthermore, Taiwan has completed two free elections of a sovereign president, a leader who does not report to the “central” government in Beijing.

The Anti-Secession Law says: “In the event that…possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted, the state shall employ non-peaceful means and other necessary measures to protect China’s sovereignty and territorial dignity.” In fact, peaceful means have never been used. China and Taiwan today are as friendly as the United States and Russia during the Cold War. China has continued to point over 700 missiles at Taiwan, and shows no signs of decreasing their numbers. Taiwan continues to buy military equipment from the U.S.

The Anti-Secession Law got a standing ovation at the National People’s Congress of China ratified the Anti-Secession Law on March 14 because it was the culmination of this fantasy, this narrative that the government of China has been force-feeding its people and foisting upon the international community for decades. The assembly stood up and applauded, patting itself on the back: this must be the final stroke of genius. If we make into law, everyone must recognize it. Even the “Taiwan compatriots.”

The CCP has repeated ad nauseum, at home and abroad, that the “Taiwan Question” is a domestic issue. In fact, the Cross-Strait situation has been teetering on the edge between domestic and international status since 1949, when the government that calls itself the “Republic of China” fled to the island, and the Communist government that calls itself the “People’s Republic of China” took over power in Beijing. At the beginning, both the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party) and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) claimed sovereignty over the entire territory of Taiwan and China, and would agree that the conflict was a civil war.

But in 2005, this is no longer the case. Taiwanese nationalism has grown steadily since the election of the first non-Kuomintang president. The Nationalist party that once claimed sovereignty over the whole of China is now the main opposition to the Democratic Progress Party (DPP), led by current Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian. The DPP has constructed its platform on this new nationalism. The old ambition to reconquer the mainland is little more than a joke for most Taiwanese citizens.

China has also repeated ad nauseum that a small band of radical “secessionists” have hijacked the Taiwanese mainstream in order to further their own political gain. Perhaps on the Mainland it would be possible for politicians to impose their agenda upon an entire population, and quash all dissent.

In Taiwan, however, the free press bashes the DPP as often as it bashes the Kuomintang. The majority of the Taiwanese population does not necessarily want immediate independence; nor does it necessarily prefer reunification. The current Chinese political climate is unthinkable for most Taiwanese, because even though they disagree politically amongst themselves, they agree that everyone has the right to disagree. Even ardent Kuomintang supporters, who generally lean a little more towards reunification, were a part of the 95% that did not endorse the Anti-Secession Law.

Perhaps the CCP is unable to simply understand the meaning of political plurality.

By trying to impose the single master narrative of reunification on all Taiwanese citizens of varying political persuasions, the Anti-Secession law denies the Taiwanese people the right to decide their own destiny.

One question for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): if you put a missile in place on the mainland side of the Taiwan Strait for every word in your fantasy story, will it become reality? If you yell and threaten to start World War III, will you get a “yes” from the Taiwan public that is truly a “yes” and not a festering “no”?

Sure, the story of “reunification” may become reality for the general public of China, especially for citizens who have never crossed PROC borders, and never have full access to free, uncensored Internet. It may even be enough to convince the EU members to lift the arms embargo, provided that the exchange pads their pockets with renminbi. But as long as China does not admit that other narratives exist, that multiplicity challenges this hegemonic “integrity,” the Taiwan Question will never be solved.

Taiwanese politicians will continue to agitate, to shout out words of dissent to the world with the real support of their real constituency. Just ask the million Taiwanese citizens who took to the streets in Taipei on March 26. For them, this is a struggle for survival. This is a struggle for the recognition that reality is manifold, that power does not equal justice, that saying something loudly means you are deafening—not that you are right.

Op Ed on Outsourcing and Lou Dobbs (draft form)

2005-04-02T17:28:00.000-05:00

Brace yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, for the imminent alien invasion. Well, at least, according to CNN news show host and winner of the 2004 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration.

“Tonight,” announces Lou Dobbs at the top of his show on March 21, 2005, “illegal alien invasion.”

Should we, and Lou’s half a million daily viewers, for that matter, pull out our machetes and join the Minutemen project, patrolling the Arizonian border for cold-blooded extraterrestrials?

All word play aside, Lou Dobbs has been using his soapbox on CNN—“Lou Dobbs Tonight,” to sow paranoia in the viewing public. Whether he’s reporting on outsourcing—the “assault on the American middle class”—or the issue of illegal immigration from Latin America—the “illegal alien invasion”—Dobbs seeks to divide, to isolate U.S. and THEM. Feel violated, he drones into the nation’s airwaves every weekday evening. Feel angry and mistreated, and afraid.

And he is winning national awards for his work.

True, no one can fail to give Dobbs credit for bringing two important issues into national political discussion. By single-mindedly pursuing these two causes, making them permanent segments on his news show, Dobbs has amassed a remarkable collection of coverage on the subject.

But something seems amiss when the Broken Borders series begins to connect every single problem plaguing American society—including terrorism and education—to the problem of illegal immigration. As recently as the March 29th show, Dobbs claimed that the public school systems are “losing their battles” because they have been “inundated with illegal immigration.”

“A few generations ago, you'd be talking about the Irish flooding our schools, and breaking down the educational standard,” replies his guest Cesar Perales, president and general counsel for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.

To this, Dobbs answers: “...too many people, it seems to me, are coming to this as a racial issue rather than as a social, an American issue, that's fundamental to understanding what is in our national interest.”

Lou Dobbs is in a serious state of denial. His rhetoric is filled with antagonistic sound-bytes such as “alien invasions” and “inundations.” How could anyone have the “temerity” to speak out in defense of “porous borders”? How could banks offer aliens home loans, and how could realtors sell them houses as if they had a right to even breathe American air? Why, this is simply “madness.”

In between the dry segments of news and peppered rhetoric, Lou Dobbs peddles a latent racist agenda that is an easy trap in today’s global economy.

On an international level, the gap between rich and poor nations has become devastatingly apparent. The United States is not the only country seeing a large influx of illegal immigration: Western Europe is also facing a similar dilemma. The economic elite need hands for their manual labor, but turn their noses at the idea of naturalizing the inferior masses as citizens. What, those aliens, Americans? Like us? In our neighborhoods, our supermarkets, our very workplaces?

With outsourcing, the aliens no longer threaten to infiltrate our daily lives as Americans, but terrorize instead our livelihoods. They will soon make our skills irrelevant and we will all grow hungry, if Dobbs is correct. (As he once put it, “the dollar [is] under assault by both the euro and the yen.”) Like our currency, we are under assault from people who don’t understand our way of life, who are fundamentally different, and because they are not American do not deserve “American jobs.”

What should bother us not as Americans, but as human beings, is that he implies there are people who should have jobs, who have a right to certain work, and there are others who simply do not. They are have-nots. They don’t deserve something that is fundamentally American.

In this day and age, globalization has made that nationalistic claim obsolete.

I’d like to point out that, as a Taiwanese American who lived for several years in Taiwan, I myself am a witness to what outsourcing can do to an economy. Taiwan developed into an “Asian tiger” economy long before China became the world’s rising economic star. In the 1995 movie Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear opens the flap on the arm of his space suit to read “MADE IN TAIWAN,” not “MADE IN CHINA” or “MADE IN KOREA.” But as we entered the new millennium, the manufacturing of cheap goods became more and more irrelevant as an industry in Taiwan. Companies in China made the same goods faster and cheaper. A lot of paranoia ensued: what are we to do? Are we going to starve? Are we going to be swallowed whole by the Mainland?

Taiwan’s financial difficulties are far from over. But the attitude in Taiwan has slowly switched from hysteria to pragmatism. Farmers cultivated unique new hybrid produce selections to introduce to the world market. Towns known for traditional crafts cast themselves as tourist attractions. Industry leaders began to seek niches in high-tech research, development, and creative design. The semiconductor manufacturing companies responsible for Taiwan’s quick rise have moved quickly to diversify their services.

The Chinese may be political enemies to some in Taiwan, and economic enemies to some in America, but in the end, they just do some things better. So does India, Dobb’s other scapegoat for the “assault” on the American middle class. Instead of pointing fingers, America’s best and brightest should be looking for new ways to shine. And if the poor “middle class” is not hopelessly complacent and incompetent, as Mr. Dobbs seems to believe, it will also reinvent itself. I have faith that American society can reassert its resilience, just like the Taiwanese.

Competition with people of different race, culture, and nationality is a challenge, not a menace. Will America rise to meet it, or simply pile accolades at the feet of those, who like Lou Dobbs, make their living blaming bad times on the mysterious Other?

Chapter One of my novella, which is in the works

2005-03-20T16:06:00.000-05:00

ONE

When he was seven, Andre found his mother in the attic. A mound of black and white feathers splayed on the floor. She was preening.

She knelt leaning forward, pinching feather by feather between her sharp, long fingernails. Right hand, left hand, right hand, left. She pulled the dirty things along the length of each quill, and flicked them out into the air, into the sunshine. She was an angel under the skylight.

And then, she was done. She sat back slowly on her feet, brought her shoulders out of a hunch. The dust settled. She picked up the whole thing by the collar and shook it, and it was so long that the ends dragged in the dust bunnies. With a strange look of purpose, she lifted the feathers, turned them, so that Andre could see the inside.

It was a cloak. A magic cloak of feathers. And his mother was drawing it closer to her shoulders; she was putting it on.

Andre sneezed from the wooden slat ladder and jerked his head below the open square of the trap door, but it was too late. He heard a gasp, and then her bare feet coming closer over the wooden floor.

“Andre,” she said, sounding relieved. “It’s only you.” She reached down with her hands and he lifted his arms so that she could pick him up. He was fished up through the door and towards the light, towards her. His feet knocked into each other when he wrapped them around her waist, but he wasn’t too big like his Dad always said. He burrowed his nose into her neck and grabbed at the back of her linen summer dress.

She stood up straight without holding him, letting him cling to her, but now she put her hands on his back, smoothing the bare skin with a warm hand. “You didn’t put on your clothes,” she murmured. “When did you wake up?”

Andre didn’t answer. Maybe if he stayed quiet, she wouldn’t ask anymore, and he could just hold on to her.

“Andre, you have to let me go,” she said, her hand slipping off abruptly. A slightly chilly summer morning draft made the hair on the back of his neck rise. “Come down.”

Reluctantly, he uncrossed his feet and let her put him down. But he grabbed a soft fold of her orange creamsicle-colored dress. The breeze pushed it up a little, like a balloon, like there was nothing inside but air.

She looked at him, as if to say, silly boy. She unbuttoned the dress down the front, twisting each one deftly like when she shelled peanuts for him. Down, down, down, until the waist, and then she shifted her shoulders, and the whole thing fell off into a limp heap at his feet. There was nothing inside but her warm, creamy skin.

He stared at her as she picked up the orange linen in her fingers and wrapped it around his shoulders. He stared at her as she walked toe first back towards the magic cloak. He stared until she turned, and met his eyes.

“I’ll be back for you,” she said in a whisper that he could barely hear. She bent down to the feathers, and in one swift movement, flung it up so that it swirled about her shoulders and came down to her red knees.

“No!” he yelled, but it was too late, and it was as if the orange linen held him to the spot. He couldn’t throw it off. Her arms lifted in the cloak, and she was changing, and he couldn’t stop her. The feathers sleeked to her arms and came up white under her belly; her toes curled and pushed up so that her body became long and thin starting from the stick-like legs, up through her stomach and chest to her arched neck and raised chin. And then her face—her face that no longer looked back at him—hardened long and sharp in a beak that pointed up to the skies.

She was an angel, still, in the halo of the sunshine. “Don’t go!” he said, finally able to say something, but from her mouth there came only a deafening, shrill cry that brought tears to his eyes. She picked her way towards him, awkward in her new, scaly black legs, and suddenly out of the sunshine she was frightening. There was no softness left in her wild beady eyes, in her small red-capped head. Backing up too quickly, he tripped on the dress and stared horrified. She would peck him with her hard beak. She would hurt him.

But she turned before him, and arching her tail-feathers, made a run towards the spot where she had sat preening, the spot right under the skylight. She ran an awkward, leggy run, working up a strong wind with her wings so that he smelled the muddy smell of a marsh, and suddenly, she was flying up—but there was nowhere for her to fly—but the skylight, oh the skylight had been cranked open, and as he watched she pushed it all the way with her hard, long beak. And at the same time she arched her back so that her entire body, new and feathered and sleek, just fit through the frame.

She was gone.

Andre shoved at the dress, and finally he was able to yank his arms and legs out. The breeze blowing by his cheek made its wetness go cold.

He scrambled to his knees, to his feet, as something in his nose began to hurt. Tears came out to release the hurt, but he couldn’t see anything but the blurry color of sunshine. He wiped his eyes too hard with his fingers. He had to find Dad.

Sometimes, she let him dial on the phone himself, and he knew Dad’s number by heart. Two-oh-five-seven-three-nine-nine. Andre lowered his shaky feet onto the slats of the wooden ladder one-by-one, and repeated the number with each step.

Two-oh-five-seven-three-nine-nine. Two-oh-five-seven-three-nine-nine.

The phone was on the little table next to their bed. He picked it up and dialed (two-oh-five-seven-three-nine-nine), but there was no sound. It wasn’t on. What button turned it on, so that it made noise?

He wiped his nose with his right hand. One of the buttons was blue, not like the other gray buttons, and when Andre looked harder, he could spell out the word “TALK” in white print. He punched it with his pointer finger. Sure enough, red light came on. The phone whined in his hand.

Andre found the numbers and pressed their buttons (two-oh-five-seven-three-nine- nine) one-by-one, then put the phone to his ear. Holding the phone with both hands, and waited:

“Hello, Rhys Cameron at the Herald.” His father’s voice sounded flat and unfriendly over the line.

“Daddy!” He started to cry.

“Andre? What’s wrong?”

Andre wanted to tell him, but he couldn’t say anything. So he cried louder. “Daddy.”

“Andre, what’s going on, where’s your mother?”

“She’s gone,” he managed to say.

“She’s gone? What do you mean she’s gone?” His father’s voice sounded mad. What did he do wrong? Andre stopped crying so loud, but couldn’t stop himself from drawing in a loud, shuddery breath. There was a long silence over the phone. “Are you alone?”

“Uh huh.” Andre couldn’t see clearly in front of him, couldn’t see the room. “Don’t move. It’s going to be alright, I’ll be right home.” And as he hung up, Andre could hear his father’s angry mutter. He slammed the phone back on its set.

By the time his father unlocked the front door and opened it with a crash, Andre was hiding under his bed. Every once in a while he would sneeze. His mother had told him never to hide under the bed, because the dirty things down there would make him sick, but he didn’t care anymore. When would she come back for him?

He sniffed and rubbed his nose with his arm so that he’d stop sneezing, so that his father wouldn’t find him. Heavy sounds of shoes were coming down the hallway, closer and closer to his room. Andre held his breath. He saw the leather-shoed feet enter and pause by his bed. Don’t come down here, don’t come down here, he chanted silently, and squeezed his eyes shut.

He heard his father’s breath close to his ear and opened his eyes. His father was squatting down, looking at him with red eyes. “Hey, there,” he said. “You want to come out?”

Andre shook his head.

His father sighed and stood up. Andre closed his eyes again, because maybe his father would go away. “Shit, ” he heard him say. Suddenly, he felt something tugging hard on his feet, and he was brought abruptly back out into the sunshine of his room. “Ow!” he cried out loud. His back was scratched painfully hot by the rough carpet.

His father sat him up and put a big hand on his back. “Did I hurt you?” Something sounded vague, unfocused in his father’s voice, like he didn’t know what he was saying. Pushing Andre forward like a little doll, his father took a peek at his back. “Sorry.” And then he rubbed the back so that it hurt even more.

Andre kicked at his father’s knees and scuffled backwards on the seat of his underwear. “It hurts!” he said.

His father sat down, letting his big right leg fall on the carpet. His left arm, buttoned into the business shirt, rested heavily on his knee, and the hand flopped down. “So she left,” he said. He put his other hand over his eyes. He was breathing deep and hard.

Andre nodded.

“Where did she go?”

“She…changed.”

“What?”

“She put on her feathers and changed.”

His father looked up, and his face was suddenly frightening.

“I couldn’t stop her!” said Andre. “I tried!” And he put his forehead between his two dirty, red knees. The skin on his back hurt. His nose hurt. He was going to cry.

“She left…she left from the attic, didn’t she.” Andre peeked out at his father through his watery eyes. “I didn’t think she’d actually do it. It’s not your fault.” His father pulled him roughly by the arms into a hug. Andre’s legs were trapped under him uncomfortably. He rubbed his face against the stripes of the business shirt.

“Why’d she leave?”

“I don’t know, Andre.” Andre heard the words rumble through his father’s chest. He was holding him too hard. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” Andre allowed himself to be stood up, and held his father’s hand all the way to the bathroom.

His father let go of his hand to turn on the hot water. Andre had never been washed by his father before. Probably his father knew how. Andre ventured a smile, and took off his underpants to get ready for the bath.

But his father was sitting on the toilet, holding his head in his hands and shaking. A strange sound was coming from the low part in his throat. Was his father changing, too?

“Daddy…don’t cry.”

“Not now, Andre.” His voice was ragged, ugly. “Just give Daddy a moment, ok?”

Andre shifted around a little bit. He needed to use the toilet. “Mommy’s coming back, right?”

“No!” The word tore out of his father’s throat, and his head emerged from his hands, the eyes red and raw. “She’s never coming back, don’t you understand?”

“She said she’s coming back for me,” yelled Andre. “That’s what she said!”

“You fucking don’t understand, kid. She’s not your mother any more. She’s a crane. She’s a crane for good and she’s not coming back this time.”

Tears were coming fast down Andre’s cheeks. “She’s not a crane.” It sounded like a dirty word to him. “She’s mine.”

“Fuck.”

There was nothing else to say. The water was running hot, steaming up the room around them. The mirror was completely misted up, so that Andre couldn’t see his own face. But after a while, he must have stopped crying. Because he woke up when his father picked him up by the armpits and splashed him into the bathtub before he had time to kick his way out of it. The water was warm. His father had rolled the sleeves of the business shirt up around his elbows, and was wetting a sponge. He squeezed it slowly over Andre’s head, so that the water ran down in dribbles, and the tight, dried feeling of tears on his face was washed away in stripes. His father wiped his face swab by swab with the sponge, cleaning away the dirty things. The dirty words.

His father was good at giving baths, after all.

Rough Draft of Op-Ed on the real issues behind direct flights between Taiwan and China

2005-02-16T01:48:00.000-05:00

Cross-straits relations between Taiwan and China made international headlines in the past few weeks when the two sides agreed to institute a series of direct flights for the Lunar New Year holiday. In US newspapers, articles highlighted the historic nature of these flights, which would fly non-stop from airports within Mainland China proper to Taiwan without transferring in Hong Kong or Macau.

The mandatory stopover policy, which began in 1949 with the establishment of the PROC, remains a symbolic barrier against direct contact, and is a standing reminder of enmity and separateness. As long as there is a strict border policy blocking movement across the straits, the two sides remain as divided as East and West Berlin before 1989.

Are the one-time Lunar New Year flights the first blow to the wall between Taiwan and China?

Even the most naïve observer of the potentially explosive cross-straits situation would not be so simplistic as to believe that cross-straits hostility can disappear overnight because of one diplomatic move. Recent policies on both sides of the straits continue to escalate the tensions: Beijing is moving towards the ratification of “anti-secession legislation,” and President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan seems ready to make good on his promise to “revise the constitution,” which China regards as a declaration of independence.

In the end, the Lunar New Year direct flights are merely a result of short-sighted political maneuvering in Taiwanese politics. (The CCP, of course, views the success of the direct flights as an added bonus, a chance to draw Taiwan ever closer to reunification.) The corporate sector in Taiwan has long thrown its weight behind direct flights. Taiwanese businessmen have large-scale investments on the mainland, and travel often between Taiwan and China. They must apply for a taibaozheng, or “Taiwanese Countryman Document,” issued by the mainland instead of using their Taiwanese passport, which is issued by the Taiwanese government—this is an accepted practice. Yet businessmen find the extra hours spent waiting for plane transfers as a ridiculous waste of time. Lengthening the commute wastes time, and time is money. The recent Lunar New Year flights are the culmination of years of lobbying.

Perhaps here we should examine the reason behind the enthusiastic reception of the New Year direct flights within the Taiwanese corporate community. The Lunar New Year for ethnically Chinese people everywhere is the ultimate extended family celebration in a culture that places a heavy emphasis on family. The direct flights were designed for the specific purpose of allowing Taiwanese businessmen to travel home for the New Years’ holiday. A group of tourists who tried to take advantage of the flights were refused tickets because they did not fulfill the requirements. They were not going home.

The overwhelming popularity of these homecoming flights reflects the strange lifestyle choice of many expatriated businessmen. Most of them have left their families in Taiwan and live alone on the mainland. Direct flights are a big deal, because these businessmen do not see their families for most of the year. If their lobby for direct flights were to bear fruit, they would be able to visit home with much higher frequency, not to mention at a much cheaper cost.

But why would so many businessmen choose this way of living? Wouldn’t it only be rational to relocate the entire family, eradicating the need for home-visit flights, whether they are direct or non-direct?

This situation is anything but rational, because at the end of the day, the majority of Taiwanese businessmen do not consider China home. By choosing to leave their families in Taiwan, they show that they do not consider the mainland a good environment for raising a family.

The reason for this widespread mistrust of the mainland lies in the fundamentally authoritarian political system in China. During the campaign for the 2004 Taiwanese presidential election, Taiwanese businessmen who were suspected of supporting the “green” or pro-independence ideology at home found themselves the focus of financial investigation by government officials in China. These “green businessmen” were often denied papers for building factories or held in custody for purported espionage. Chinese authorities declared openly that such “green businessmen” who made money in China in order to support the pro-independence cause in Taiwan were “unwelcome.”

The powers that be in China sent a loud message to Taiwanese businessmen: you and your capital investments are welcome, but only so long as you are politically correct. If you toe the line in your personal political beliefs, you will be refused the right to work.

Given that Taiwanese businessmen are working in this sort of coercive environment, why would they subject their families to the same oppressive scrutiny?

The desire for direct flights within the Taiwanese corporate community is filled with paradoxes and self-contradictions. Speaking loud and clear with their lifestyle choices, they keep home safe and far away in Taiwan; but because they cannot face the fact of their own exile, they demand that Taiwan be brought closer, that it be more and more accessible. They suffer a fundamental conflict between business interests and deep-seated personal interests.

Breaking down the wall between Taiwan and China is not a matter of softening cross-border transportation policies. This is a stalemate over both national identity and individual freedom that could never be resolved by something so simple as direct flights. When all’s said and done, home is where the heart is, and unless China makes an honest attempt to woo Taiwanese hearts, instituting real change in the political system, the Taiwanese cannot consider China home.

Blog Battle

2005-02-02T00:36:00.000-05:00

So, for the last few days, I've been engaging in a blog-battle with this mainland blogger in the comments section of an American guy's blog. Richard--that's the host's name, I think--writes often in the main section of the blog about cross-straits relations, and problems with the Chinese government. Apparently he lived there for a while and had a bad impression of the place. So, as you can imagine, he himself leans towards Taiwan's position. But there is another blogger named bingfeng who claims Richard is irrationally anti-China, and that if Taiwan really opened its eyes, it would realize that China is not so bad, after all. Somehow, his comments just rubbed me the wrong way, so I started this back and forth with him that is starting to be JUST a little heated. Check out our exchange at the bottom of this comments link:

http://pekingduck.org/archives/002212.php

(Also, while you're at it, check out my latest op-ed in the Yale Herald. It's also about China, although not directly about Taiwan:

http://www.yaleherald.com/article.php?Article=4007)

PS: I'll post my latest comment from pekingduck below, because it's the strongest response I've written so far, I think. Please check out the link if you want to see what I'm referring to in the phrase "join or die." And please do check out the link in any case...the arguments are more complete there.

******************************************

That's exactly it. "Join or die" is the element of coercion that I'm talking about. I'm not making a direct comparison between the specific case of American revolutionaries and Taiwanese pro-independance politicians, but I AM saying that the Taiwanese politicians are identifying a threat, and for one reason or another, a lot of Taiwanese believe that there is a threat. That there is coercion.

If Taiwan and the Mainland got into a war, who do you think would win? Without outside help, of course Taiwan would be crushed. So what kind of a threat do you think the Taiwanese missiles are?

One assumption you are making is rubbing me the wrong way. Why is it that we must "forget about taiwan independance"? Why don't we "forget reunification," too--not just reunification through war, but reunification? What is intolerable to Chinese extremists is independance, and what is intolerable to Taiwan extremists is reunification. You are assuming a position closer to that of China's agenda.

You often comment that "outsiders," or foreigners, don't know what it's like within China. Well, I'm from within Taiwan. Are you saying that you know as much as I do what it's like to be Taiwanese? I'm telling you honestly how I feel. And what I feel is that, from the ground up, the mainstream of Taiwan BELIEVES in Taiwan as an entity. Even if it were to become a province of China, it would an individual entity with a specific, unique history. And within that history, there is a sense of victimization at the hands of Mainlanders--even if it WASN'T the CCP. Within living memory, the Mainland has been a source of oppression and threat, and it doesn't matter that it was the CCP during the KMT years. For better or worse, Taiwan has a postcolonial mentality.

So maybe those feelings are irrational. But can you deny that they exist? If you were to ignore them, you would be ignoring an important part of what is going on in Taiwanese identity politics. And then you will claim not to understand why Taiwan is being foolish, and irrational, and mad.

Let me ask one question: What kind of nationalism is rational? You say, "no intelligent and rational person who understand China well will believe that an independence of Taiwan without a war is possible." Well, isn't that because of "irrational" nationalism on the part of the Chinese people? Economically, not possessing Taiwan is not hurting China right now. Perhaps it's strategically valuable in some sense, but come on. China doesn't really NEED Taiwan. It just happens to WANT it. Because of specific historical reasons, China believes that Taiwan is Chinese. And because of OTHER specific historical reasons, Taiwan claims to be culturally, but not politically Chinese.

Look, national borders are random. The map of Europe in the 15th century is a far cry from what it is now, and China has changed even more since the original Qin dynasty. None of the reasons you have brought up are compelling enough to convince me, a Taiwanese, that Taiwan and China should be part of the same POLITICAL entity. I don't want a war. But neither do I appreciate the biased ground assumptions that are being made internationally, and within China.

So convince me.

Jon Stewart and Critique of tv news

2005-01-25T01:03:00.000-05:00

I wrote this Op-ed that never got published, but I feel vindicated, because Crossfire was actually ended in early January after something like 15 or 17 years of being on-air. The power of an honest comment?

***********************
If you want to compare your show to a comedy show, you're more than welcome to.
--Jon Stewart to Tucker Carlson, during his appearance on CNN Crossfire

On my last day as a reporting intern at Taipei Times, an English-language newspaper in Taiwan, the lot of us went out for a hearty meal of noodles and TV-reporter bashing.

“All the TV people go in, and get their requisite bit, and then we print people sit down with the person and get the real story,” said one of my co-workers, waving her chopsticks in disapproval.

I learned a lot that night. In Taiwan, it is apparently common practice for TV reporters to shove their microphones in front of politicians’ noses whenever they can, forcing the unwilling interviewee to say something—anything, even if it has nothing to do with the press conference or event at hand. Flustered politicians, when baited with the appropriate question, may make oh-so-juicy, inexplicable statements—comparing their opponents to meat buns, for example—starting media flurries that can last for days.

“I really meant that in a good way,” you might hear one day while watching the evening news at home. The suited legislator on television stands in front of a bush somewhere, as if he were on the way to his car in the parking lot. He looks like he’s trying real hard to damage control now that he finally has a chance to fix things up, but by now it’s more of a salvage mission than a rescue. “That sort of meat bun is a traditional snack, so I meant that he has local flavor. Who wouldn’t want to be called a meat bun? I think they’re… rather tasty.”

This election season in the United States, I didn’t hear anyone compare Dubya to a Texas BBQ spare rib, or Kerry to a pasty Boston clam chowder—at least, not in so many words. But somewhere between August and November, I began to wonder whether mainstream television news—even in America—was inherently ridiculous.

Can you make a medium of spectacle into a medium of depth and meaningful analysis? Or is it an inevitable that media culture recycles half-baked epithets like “flip-flopper” ad nauseum? Must we hear quite so many analyses of Bush’s twitchy little smirk during the first presidential debate, as if he’s in the running for an Emmy and this just might be what loses him the little golden statue?

Make no mistake—we want a quick dose of cattiness with our political news. We want the key words of the day drummed into our minds so that we can all be catty, too. And really, we just want to vote for the guy who looks the best on TV.

Or do we? When Jon Stewart threw down the gauntlet to mainstream television media during his appearance on CNN’s Crossfire, there was a powerful public resonance that made waves across vastly different mediums. Starting the night of Stewart’s confrontation with Tucker Carlson, the Republican half of Crossfire’s dynamic debate duo, blogs overflowed with passionate reactions. According to tech news on CNET.com, clips of Stewart’s appearance became the hottest download on the web overnight. Online video hosting site IFilm reported more than 670,000 downloads by the following Tuesday.

By then, the story was still current, partly due to continuing hype in the online media, and partly due to a Crossfire response on Monday by Robert Novak and James Carville. Daily newspapers, including the Washington Post, posted their own reactions as late as Tuesday. Maybe it did take a Jon Stewart to deliver a “drubbing” to mainstream news, pundits and columnists posited. Maybe it took a comic to put the Crossfire guys off balance and tell them they were doing theater, not debate.

Maybe, just maybe, the viewing public is not beyond help.

Jon Stewart—and The Daily Show, itself—is only funny as long as the world of news and politics remains absurd. As of October 15th, the date of Stewart’s Crossfire appearance, the public still appreciates the reality check.

According to Stewart himself, the most absurd thing about television news is the fact that it takes itself seriously. An industry filled with more “TV people” than journalists shouldn’t be the authority on truth, he said on an October NPR Fresh Air interview. Today’s political and news television programming has become merely a soapbox for politicians to expound their party lines, and for “partisan hacks” to repeat them.

I think back to one press conference I reported on during my internship. After the speeches had been made, I waited for the television reporters—mostly women, as it happened—to chat up the main speaker and discuss what would be the best bit for him to repeat from the speech. They settled on an anecdote that was just hilarious, and when the cameras turned on, he delivered exactly what they wanted. I had the vague impression of being present on a movie set.
Maybe the problem with television news is that it’s on the television. Competing with other entertainments served up daily on the tube, news shows have to dish up tidbits to capture public attention. And if you were on camera, speaking through a lens to millions of viewers across the nation, wouldn’t you try to be larger than life? Tougher? Funnier? Could you resist the urge to ham it up, just a tiny bit?

Stewart never promised to become the savior of a mainstream media and politics. On the contrary, he stresses the fact that he is a comic and a satirist, not a serious newscaster, dancing away from critics who try to hold him accountable for his easygoing political interviews. The Daily Show, itself, is a product of the television industry. The difference is, it doesn’t pretend to
be anything else.

In a democracy, we don’t just need a government watchdog to hold our government accountable. We need a media watchdog. Preferably one that’s okay to laugh at.

Tidbits--freewrite

2004-12-31T12:18:00.000-05:00

---There is a profession that specializes in the shapes of skulls: hairdressing in Taiwan. All skilled in head massages and hair washing, the hairdressers on this little island could probably tell you about a multitude of skulls using their collective experience. They could tell you how the hair falls, or doesn't, from the white scalps they have seen. They have seen the place where the hair meets the skin, those little goosebumps that rise when hair is wet.

And they know something of what goes on under that skin, too. They know how to get a seated head talking to alleviate the boredom of immobility in the barber's chair. They know that the stories are waiting to come, at the tip of the tongue. Or maybe speaking with clients is their way of tapping life outside the glass doors, beyond the smell of perming chemicals and hair product.

Everyone leaves some hair on the floor. Who sweeps it up? What spells can you cast from the fallen curls, a memory describing the shape of a scull, an offered exchange of stories?

---Fingers already stained in muddy clashes of chalk dust, the seamstress marks the leg of my pants. "That'll do?" she asks. When I give the pants to her in a paper bag, there are remnants of the warmth from my body in the cloth. What is it that I have left with her? What is it that she feels when she picks up the cloth that has left my body, and lies compliant in her hands? Probably she thinks nothing. She sees too much of this. She lives on worn objects. The threads beneath her chalky fingers are always alive, but she has no time to think about those pulses, helter-skelter, that remain in that skin, that cloth, when shed.

The Shih Family Rose Store

2004-12-30T00:46:00.000-05:00

"Let's open our own flower shop," said my mom. "You girls can invest, and I'll take care of it."

My sister's creative writing group sold roses to fundraise for a writing contest prize. Today they arrived in large cardboard trays, bedded as if in a coffin. Dad helped carry them in. He had to drive out to help my sister and mother because Mom had locked them out of her car outside the flower shop.

We lifted the flowers out in bunches. The stems, knocking against one another, clacked cheerfully like a miniature bamboo forest. "You just can't fake that sound," said Mom with satisfaction. I dropped one on her head. "Hitting me with roses, now, are you," she said. "That's actually poetic, in a way." She bends to pick up the fallen one, feeling its green smoothness between her fingers.

There are two plastic trashcans and one storage container of roses sitting in our closed-ceiling courtyard tonight. The petals are curling purpled, and slow. They wait tied in bunches, with the patience of reeds bent into wicker. Tomorrow they will be packaged by new hands in plastic. The day after, they will be sold.

But we won't bid them good bye. We're only the shopkeepers.

Note On How to View This Blog

2004-12-11T04:49:00.000-05:00

I've decided to start posting some articles/creative writing on this site. They can run long, I know. If you get bored, refresh and click on links to different articles and past posts on the side bar at the top.

Of course, if you actually want to read it, and it's distracting to be scrolling down a web page, email me and I'll send you a word document. (amethystjazz@gmail.com)

--Evelyn

As Good as it Gets--a journalistic essay on being an amateur music in New Haven

2004-12-11T04:45:00.000-05:00

As Good As It Gets
By Evelyn Shih

It is October 30, and in keeping with the Halloween theme, the three members of local New Haven band MurderVan are rocking the Café Nine stage in black and white face paint. Not quite Marilyn Manson, but as their punk songs crash through the wooden beams of Cafe Nine, you almost have to wonder if that was what they were going for.

The mood is bacchanalian: tonight is the third of nine anniversary nights for the music bar, and it is completely, oh most definitely, devoted to punk. Anyone who is somebody on the local punk scene, and anyone who is into punk is here. MurderVan, the first band up, froths up the atmosphere with their driving, full-bodied riffs. Chuck, the doorman, is bobbing his head and trying to keep up with the frenetic beats. A skinny man with an alarmingly thin neck and a ponytail of gray hair, he has the unfortunate look of a bobble-head.

But inside the door from where Chuck is perched on a high stool, the patrons seem to be enjoying a truly “sick” set. Some are standing with their beers and grooving to the grungy sound, while others mill around the bar. A man with a shaved head and not a few body piercings nods his head in time next to where I am sitting. His eyes are closed, as if in prayer to the gods of rock. Café Nine is their cathedral tonight, as walls of pure energy in sound emanate from the stage.

Welcome to the Nine, billed as the musician’s living room, where much of the audience consists of local musicians, where everyone knows your name—more, they get your music. New Havenites have come here for decades to play original music and network with other creative people because this is virtually the only place in town where you can do that, even if you’re a no-name amateur stringing along a day job. If you get a gig here, the crowd listens. They feel your music. They know you’re gonna make it big.

And you should be congratulated. According to James Velvet, legendary in local music circles as the front man of the late-great Mockingbirds, it’s hard to get a gig playing your own music these days, even at a local bar like Cafe Nine. For every band that gets to play there, there may be ten more trying to get in.

Welcome. If you’ve gotten this far, you have finished your first rite of passage on the way to rock and roll stardom, but you should know—you’ve got a long, long way to go.

Speaking with James Velvet, who at 54 sports a head of white hair over a strong, beaky nose, it is easy to feel that up-and-coming New Haven bands like MurderVan are on a fast track to nowhere. Original music is a hard sell, and always has been—James knows that from over twenty years of experience as an amateur musician in New Haven. Café Nine is a rare outlet for local bands to play their own music; most bars are only interested in cover bands, and larger commercial venues go for the national acts. Over the years, however, the independent music scene has become harder and harder to break into for new musicians. As equipment dropped in price, more of the middle class population gained the means to fuel a rock ‘n’ roll dream, and the ranks of the musicians grew. Unfortunately, the ranks of listeners only seemed to shrink, drawn away by other entertainments like dance clubs. DJs may be doing original mixing, but the music they use is all major label. Music by local bands playing independent music have a hard time getting any air time, let alone gigs.

“Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t go for less than $100 a night,” said James. “But everyone you saw the other night at Café Nine was playing for free. Sometimes when I’m playing acoustic in a coffee shop, I play for pass-the-hat and for selling my record and maybe free coffee.”

I drove with James Velvet to the weekly recording of his radio show, Local Bands, the only radio show dedicated to original local music on the 50,000 watt WPLR. James and his friend Rick Allison have been hosting this show and playing mail-in submissions of original music in the Connecticut region for seventeen years—they’ve seen a lot of bands like MurderVan come and go.

You may think you’re going to make it to the top of the charts when you’re twenty, he tells me as we drive along, but if you’re still playing when you’re twenty-five, you know you’re not going anywhere. You’re not looking up, starry-eyed, counting the days and temping at a coffee place until you make it big. I do some math: by that measure, James himself has been disillusioned about becoming a famous musician for almost 30 years.
So why, then, would he continue to play in local bands, host a radio show, write songs, and cut records like those shrink-wrapped copies of his album that I held in my hand? He had a break-even philosophy, he told me. You make maybe 200 copies of your CD and you try to sell all them, mostly at gigs or to longtime fans. If you’re lucky, you’re able to do that, and then you’ll have the funds for your next record.

For James Velvet, that’s enough. Assuming they stay together, is this all a band like MurderVan can look forward to? A never-ending struggle to support an expensive hobby? As they fight their war of attrition with irrelevance, who is listening?

Rick Allison and his dog welcome us into his house and down to the basement, where he has installed a home recording studio to run his freelance voice over business. Rick is one of those people who look like their pets: his longish gray hair flops down the back of his head like a mane, and he smiles a large, wolfish smile. I’m not intimidated, but I am strangely relieved to be invited guest.

The wall of the recording studio, Rick’s inner sanctum, is chock-full with his battered professional LP collection, but on another the stacks and stacks of CDs are all amateur ventures. Somewhere in “the nether parts” of his basement, Rick assures me, are many more boxes of locally recorded LPs and cassettes—the weapons of choice in the 80s. He can be pretty sure, he says, bending over to look for an old favorite, that he’s got the largest collection of Connecticut music in the world, right there in his basement.

Of course, that was probably because no one else bothered to collect it.

James tosses two packages and one unwrapped CD on the counter: this week’s submissions, fresh additions to the collection. Slim pickings. “It varies by week,” he explains. Some weeks, James and Rick get more music than they know what to do with.

James received one of the CDs in person while dropping off more copies of his record at the local record store today—“I’m huge there,” he jokes in an underwhelmed voice. “I sold five records.” There, he bumped into another guy who was dropping off a cd for his band, called Album, and was asked eagerly whether he would “take a copy for the show.”

“Lemme tell ya, Album’s going to be mighty excited,” says James as he and Rick listen to the CD. “ ‘I met this guy at Cutler’s and now we’re on the radio!’” James acts the part of the excited young man. “And the other guys on the band are going to think, ‘This guy’s a hero.’” The song drifting out of Rick’s complex sound system does, in a way, sound heroic. A sweet emo-pop melody coasts on top of a heavy rhythm section with a distinct touch of grunge, and the entire band swings up to a respectable climax point. Dynamic shifts sound almost pro—I can picture a music video matching the sudden drops and expansions in volume. But as far as I can tell, the song is about being a young man in his early twenties in suburban Connecticut. Not quite the stuff of epics.

James taps a pen on his yellow legal pad, where the Local Bands program line-up for the past four years is recorded. They sound good enough to play, he’s thinking. But he can’t resist shaking his head. They still think they’re going to make it big. “It’ll wear off in a week, this whole being on the radio thing.”

“A week?” says Rick, incredulous.
“Well, maybe a month.”
“A month? I was thinking a couple of days.”

James shows me the CD case. “You see how it looks all nice, almost like a professionally produced album. What happened was probably, not that they did it themselves, but maybe they have a friend or a girlfriend who is good at that kind of thing.” Nowadays, it’s relatively easy to put together a disc. Most bands also have websites, where random browsers can hear their songs if they so wish. The internet is an indispensable new self-promotion tool for amateur bands.

It’s just not easy to get a gig.

“The tools are more available to people, but maybe that makes the crapshoot even worse—maybe it means there are fewer hurdles to jump before you can get out there and get your heart crushed,” says Rick. Just because you have an album and it looks great, doesn’t mean anyone will ever listen to it.

But James has a slightly different take. “It’s a lot easier now to do all this, but in a way it really is just trappings of fame, and it’s seductive. A lot of the stuff we hear on this show is made by people who enjoy the trappings.”

Like Green Day or Nine Days, Album has their own flash website with cool graphics and show dates. They have a CD worthy of sitting next to all the other offerings on the shelves at Cutler’s. They perform at least once or twice a month to a real crowd. Even if their lyrics could be cleverer, they have the right sound. There is no difference between Album and a band with a major label contract. Except for the fact that Album is about to be played on Local Bands.

Local Bands plays during the boondocks of radio programming time: 10 pm on Sunday nights. It’s nothing glamorous, but the show has “dodged the bullet” and avoided being cut many a-time. Seventeen years is an amazingly long run for a show that doesn’t bring in much revenue—but somehow, Rick and James have been allowed to keep on plugging.

The Local Bands theme comes bouncing into our headphones: “Relax—Take Off Your Slacks” has been the theme since the beginning of the show. The sax and synth instrumental track smacks loudly of the 80s, and by now, it’s starting to gain accumulate a kitschy vintage feel. James cut the track himself 20 years ago.

Rick starts right in. “Have you had enough turkey yet?” The show was set to air the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

“I lu-uhve turkey, man,” says James, gesturing with a pencil in the air. James has suddenly put on a stage voice. He gesticulates so earnestly that he looks like he might fall off the stool where he is precariously perched. The two begin a free form, back and forth stream-of-consciousness spiel. “Turkey everywhere—turkey in the straw, turkey in the recording studio,” spins James. “I had some turkey at the Corner Richard’s Gourmet Deli, lemme tell ya…”

Richard’s Gourmet, along with G Guitars, is sponsoring this episode of Local Bands. After another short pitch for the amazing turkey sandwiches at the deli, the two turn their attention to the first track of the show, fresh out of a bubble-wrapped package.

“This is Rosie Coppola, with Avalon.” And we are off the air. James lifts the foam earphones and leaves them cinched at his temples. He slumps, idling while Rick goes about his business at the switchboard, swiveling on the stool like a restless little boy. He begins to tap the drum part of the song on his yellow pad. Despite their graying or white hair, these two remind me of college boys working on an audio-visual project.

“I think Rosie probably figured she was going to the top, twenty years ago,” muses James, still drumming along with the catchy pop refrain. “And I think she probably just figured out ways of making a living without going to the top.” I am surprised: the woman singing sounds like she can’t be over twenty-five. The portrait on the CD cover shows a young-looking woman, thirty at the most. Yet Rosie has been making a life in amateur music work for as long as I’ve been alive. With her current husband, Rosie runs a studio and a music school, bringing up a new generation of aspiring pop musicians in New Haven.

I can’t help wondering: are these kids going anywhere? Twenty years from now, as they near middle age, will their voices be heard on Local Bands, young and unchanged?

Local Bands gives the WPLR somewhere to send all the local artists begging for airtime. When asked by licensing agents if they serve the community, they can point to James and Rick. “ ‘Well, there are these guys…” says Rick in a blustery imitation of a program director.

But do they serve the community?

“That I don’t know,” says Rick, leaning forward. “Is it just encouraging them in the foolish idea that they’ll become rich and famous and the next rock star. I mean, perhaps we are one little part in that enabling structure.”

“It does give them a chance to point to the show to say, we were played on WPLR.” When James and Rick first got the show together, they were excited about being on air, themselves. They used to drive around in James’ car—what was the model again? A 1986 Pontiac Bonneville, just a classic car. Didn’t even have a radio. Brought the FM boombox in the car, and listened to their own show. That might be how some of these people share the show—at 10 at night on a Sunday.

But it’s a snowball’s chance in hell for a band to make it beyond local fame, as far as Rick can tell. On mainstream radio, anything people haven’t heard before is “bad music.” Making it big enough to be recognized as “good”—that would be like getting struck by lightening over and over again. If the song is perfect, then you’re waiting for the right person to get you into the door, and if the people are right, you’re waiting for the right moment—and by the time that comes, everything’s likely to have fallen apart.

What does it take, really, to make it out of New Haven, out of Local Bands, and onto the Billboard Top 20?

Actually, James and Rick have never played music on their show by the most famous local musician. Michael Bolotin, now known as Michael Bolton, worked out of his house in East Haven, where he produced his own music. He took a job as a staff writer for Columbia Music, writing generic songs for generic stars, until finally his own career as a pop singer took off on its own. Apparently, you have to be willing to work in the machine and do the drudgework.

“And maybe,” quips Rick, “losing a vowel out of his last name was the right thing for to do.”
But Local Bands isn’t here for the Michael Boltons of the world, who aspire to bring their talent at sappy, saccharine pop to the national stage. It is here to keep the spirit alive, the spirit of getting some people together in a band and playing your own music, your own way. Rick points to an unlabeled CD lying haphazardly on his desk. It’s a demo from the high school kids who practice next door. He can’t play it, because the quality’s not good enough—they haven’t learned to record properly—but still, they’re doing some cool stuff with their songs, and it was endearing that the entire band trooped over to knock on his door like a bunch of trick o’ treaters on Halloween.

When these kids do get their act together and record a decent album Rick can play on the show, their song will never beat Bolton’s “Go the Distance” in terms of airplay. But if they’re not looking for that, if they just want an outlet for something great they cooked up with their friends, all the hard work will have been worth it.

What these kids have is what the best of the best musicians keep alive within them, even if they are worldwide superstars. They keep that first-time excitement, that amateur’s passion—they keep that inner child alive, loving the music for music’s sake.

If you’ve been around the scene as long as James Velvet, you learn to count your blessings. You’re happy with your local audience, because you know it’s hard to have any audience. To get into a place like Café Nine now, a band has to get the attention of the bar owners or their bookers, playing for nothing sometimes to prove their mettle. “It’s competitive as hell!” he says, still amazed. “Eventually it’s going to be where we have to pay to play.”

James had been a bartender for Mike Reichbart, the founder of Café Nine, when the Mockingbirds were just getting together thirteen years ago. They were the first band ever booked. “Mike was having a party for his friends,” he told me, “and he asked us to play there. It was so successful that within a month he had live music their five or six nights a week.” Café Nine, like Local Bands, became a venue beloved by local musicians because of its distinct dedication to amateur music.

The Mockingbirds were lucky. Because of their initial connection to the Nine, they secured a once a month gig. They had a presence on the New Haven music scene—mention the name of the Mox in the New Haven Advocate, at Richter’s Bar, or even at Toads, the place that shuns local bands for national acts, and you have instant recognition. The Mox played from the back of the room, not on the raised stage, and fed off the energy of the tipsy Saturday night throng. They would go on with a rough idea of a new song, and wing it, working off their combined energies to spin out improvised riffs. They knew how to drive a crowd wild. It was these performances, every month for twelve years, which made them a local legend. If you stay around long enough, and play for the love of music, someone out there will hear you. And you will start to know their friendly faces, recognize their cheers in the roaring, beery hullabaloo.

The story of Café Nine is a little bit of a legend in itself, right from when it started as BluBartz Café in November of ’72, opened as a haven for “young radicals.” Mike Reichbart, just out of college in ’71, took a gamble and bought a property that quickly, as he says, became a “vortex for all sorts of people.” It’s not me, he says, it’s just something about the place that brings together people of different backgrounds. This was a friendly place, a place to shoot the shit and get a beer, and engage in symbiotic relationships, share the love. You’d get a Biker dude, and a Surgeon from Yale meeting up at the bar, and all of a sudden the Biker is the godfather of the Surgeon’s baby, the Surgeon gets his own bike, and everyone lives happily ever after in the United States of America.

Music was almost an obvious choice. So many of his friends were musicians, growing in New Haven, where music is the only a way to really share an experience fully, so that you both feel it. You get people up there, never met before, graphing their souls to each other. Sometimes you’d get Bobby and then Eddie Buster, brothers, played in the Count Basie band, coming down for the Saturday afternoon jam, and then you have the young musicians, maybe 16 or even 20, who all knew they had chops, but were a little shaky. And some people say, oh musical exchange is like a battle of the bands, but Café Nine’s an ego-free zone, Mike always said. So you have these amazing guys, the Busters coming back to New Haven, wailing on the corner of State and Crown, this music that you couldn’t hear even at Lincoln Center, it was so good, and after the jam they’re over there in the back saying to the young fellas, you gotta hike up that third note, or smooth that over there, and catch that cue.

And it’s sort of a wholesome atmosphere we had going, especially with those Saturday afternoon jazz jams. It’s like those girls, those two little white girls 11 and 13 who used to come to the jams to play the saxophone, real sophisticated, right out of milkin’ cows in Wisconsin, and you’d think their role model would be Kenny G or something, but without even batting an eye, and no prompting from their mom, they tell Mike that their role model is Sonny Rollins. Sonny Rollins! Mike would be proud to call them his own daughters. This is how you pass the torch. You just have to live it. You just have to feel the music.

And Mike has had more than his fair share of glorious music. If he and his wife were to die tomorrow, and going to heaven were based on the good music you had heard while you were alive, they’d be going to heaven several times over. He never regretted it for a minute.
It was never really for the money. In fact, Mike would say most of his time they lost money—although when Jimmy Velvet and his Mox played, that was always a good night, financially. It’s funny, you think about how many people are in New Haven, and a space like Café Nine with space for 100 people should be packed every single night, because there’s music every night, but no, Mainstream America goes to New York for the live music. They don’t appreciate, or don’t understand, or they’re afraid of coming down and commingling with humanity, you know, because it’s such a diverse space, and even before 911 people had problems thinking on a communal level. And they’re missing out because the music is always exceptional, always honest. The world just doesn’t know. Mike loves the people of New Haven, but they just don’t know these things. They just don’t hear the priceless music that you couldn’t buy, that you couldn’t hear again if you wanted to. And you admit that you’re bitter, because the music is such a wealth, but in the end the world doesn’t know.

James Velvet keeps on writing his music and playing on the New Haven scene because he believes in the communal spirit of Cafe Nine. Even if the world doesn’t know you, there is a small world here that will love you and applaud you until you hang up the guitar and sing no more. Economics may keep Mainstream America away from Local Bands and Cafe Nine, but in a way, Mainstream doesn’t matter.

In the end, it’s having an outlet for personal expression that is important for Johnny Java, James Velvet’s Mockingbird bassist and longtime friend. “If I couldn’t play music, I think I would wither and die,” he says.

Tonight, James is introducing me to his current band, the first after the Mox broke up last December. I am sitting at a table in Richter’s Bar with the Nortons, James, which consists of James on the bass, Mox bassist Johnny on the drums, and a young twentisome Calvin DeCutlass as the songwriting front man.

We are having a beer at Richter’s because James drinks for free there. He points out the corner where he and Johnny played covers long ago, shaking his head. “That was crazy,” he says.

Johnny gives him a wry look, as if he can’t believe they did that, either. But at least they have a lifetime of free beer. And he’s glad he did his time here—learning covers gave him stylistic range, so that now he can take a hand in arranging the original music for the Nortons. It’s like a muscle, really: the more music you learn, the more you can play. And when you play well, music repays you many times over. It becomes an emotional and spiritual outlet. He takes a sip from his glass of beer.

The creative act can be addictive. A well-groomed middle-aged man with short black hair, he is surprisingly tender about his music. “It’s Love, really, that you feel for it,” he says, trying to explain. “It’s like love for a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Music affects your personal relationships, because your band is your mistress.” One bad gig can be devastating to Johnny—it can gnaw on him for days and weeks, because a woman he loves has been mistreated, and you just can’t let her be trampled on like that.

The remedy for this devastation is not getting picked up by a record label, or getting wide national acclaim for his work. It’s not recording more albums for distribution on CD Baby or IndepenDisc, two online venues often used by local indie musicians. For Johnny, it’s really all about playing another gig—this time, a great one.

If you don’t set your sights on Bigtime, you can’t fall from merciless heights. You can’t fail, because nothing defines your success other than your own sense of good music. You make your music as good as you want it to be, not for the CD store sales. You don’t hit your height as a young man and quit music at 30—no, you can keep playing as long as your fingers can keep moving, because you’re not selling your youth. You’re not selling your image, or your ability to speak for the young and hip consumer generation.

You’re on stage, more focused than you thought you could be, drinking in the sight of the crowd there to see you, and pushing the music forward, faster, upward, and away. It doesn’t get any better than this.

There is a lull in the middle of MurderVan’s set. The lead vocalist seems to be considering what to play next. “Cock Burn!” yells someone from the audience. He grins almost devilishly in assent, and gives a nod to the other two band members.

A lanky young man with the beginnings of a beard, the lead singer starts them off with a series of high-pitched bleeps on his guitar, beating out a paranoid, cagey rhythm pattern. When he gets a good beat going, the band joins in, and the vocalists stretches his neck out, screams: “Cock burn, cock burn, cock burn! What I have is cock burn! Cock burn! Cock burn!” The band is spinning the rhythm faster and faster, in danger of wheeling beyond rationality, beyond control—the crowd is with them, cheering and whistling as the momentum of the climax breaks—and finally, they’re past it and the seismic wave of sound crashes down. They’re blasting the song forth, expanding to a heavier, slower beat while carrying the momentum of the crash.

The vocalist swings his guitar back with the thurst of the final chord, eyes closed and cast upwards in ecstasy. Silence as the reverb dies, slow and lovely. He turns back to the audience, a boyish smile gracing his face in acknowledgement of the cheers and good-natured hoots. He’s back to being a mortal now, an average early-twenty-some working in New Haven. He wipes the sweat from his brow.

MurderVan has their own website, and a music fan can download their singles. They have gigs all up and down the New England coast. They might make it out of New Haven someday—they’re still young. This band could be it.

But right now, as they bask in the glory of that spectacular set, none of that matters. They are trying to affect nonchalance to no avail. A visible glow beams from beneath the face paint, a touch of exultation. This is a night they won’t forget.

Sources:
Observations 10/30/2004
Observations at Local Bands 11/23/2004
Interview with the Nortons 11/23/2004

No Regrets--a journalistic essay on the Web Novel Craze in Taiwan and the story of one Web Novelist

2004-12-08T04:12:00.000-05:00

No Regrets
By Evelyn Shih
Word Count: 4396

As quietly as moss growing on a stone, a new genre is sneaking into the largest branches of Eslite Bookstores, the Barnes and Noble of Taiwan. Walk into the Eslite at the busy Taipei Main Station subway stop, for example, and you will see an entire section dedicated to “Web Literature.” Upon closer examination, the Red Culture publishing house insignia seems to dominate the shelves. A label on the top left corner of each Red Culture web novel cover has a small logo: “Red Fiction of the E-generation.” The accompanying illustration is halfway between anime-style and hip-urban, too dreamy for an adult look but trying to be sophisticated. The titles dance above in flouncy characters: “Don’t Let Me Carry My Umbrella Alone,” “The First Encounter of the Intimate Kind,” or “I’m Not Handsome, Underclassman Girl.” Are you young? Are you lonely? Will you, too, find true love in the heart of Taipei?

The genre of web novels, or novels originally posted on the internet, seems to have swirled from cyberspace into the shelves of mainstream publishing on an airy, insubstantial cloud of campus romance themes. Yet according to Eslite, they’ve become an indispensable genre unto themselves. In an online survey of all-time Top 100 Favorite Novels released May 2004, two out of the top five books chosen were web novels by the same author, Tsai Chi-hung. They shared the top five bracket with Chinese translations of Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Dream of the Red Chambers, a classic Qing dynasty novel.

While the chart reflects popular trends of the market more than it selects the classics, it is a powerful indicator of consumer inclinations. All summer long, Eslite promoted books on the Favorite 100 list with a 21% off sale and special displays in stores around the island. According to Eslite PR vice president Lee Yuhua, web novels were responsible for a large percentage of sales during that promotion period.

Considering the fact that all of these books can be found in their entirety on the Internet through Chinese language Google, why are people walking into bookstores like Eslite and buying them off the shelf? How did selling web content become one of the most profitable trends in Taiwan publishing since romance novels hit the market?

The popularity of web novels seems particularly astounding considering the fact that most of the authors, like most other bloggers, are amateur writers. They also tend to be young—for the most part, they published their first big hits as graduate and college students. And strangely enough, many of them come from science or engineering departments instead of Chinese literature.

Welcome to the new democratization of the publishing world, where anyone who can put their fingers to a keyboard can write and be read. Where you, a college student, can sell 100,000 copies of a book you wrote in your spare time. What are you waiting for?

~ ~ ~

I am twenty-two this year, and my growth over the years has been a series of failures, failures, and more failures. Failing the entrance exams, failing romance, failing homework, failing at being a human being…
If you think carefully about this past fifth of a century, I have managed to not succeed at a single thing.
--Detached Soul, by Shuangzi

It is winter break of junior year in college before Chen Mingmin finally sits down at her computer to write. She’s read some stuff by some guy with the screen name Lame-O Tsai who posts on the internet, thought it was an interesting idea. Her father has always wanted to be a writer, but he never got there. Maybe she’d even do better than Lame-O Tsai—she was a Chinese major, after all. She’s read plenty in her time. If she can’t write anything worthwhile by now, she might as well just shoot herself now. What a waste of twenty years. Good grief.

She isn’t good at anything, really. She isn’t very smart. Her father must have been flabbergasted with such a stupid daughter. He used to cry tears of joy when she passed her math tests in elementary school. And the entire family wept ecstatically when she finally got into college—she had to take the college examinations twice before she made it onto the lists by the skin of her teeth. We’re talking bottom of the barrel. Stuck at a tiny college in the boondocks, on a mountain hours outside of Taipei, where even the birds would refuse to lay their eggs because it was so completely boring. It would have been ok if the library was at least stocked—but no, they couldn’t even give her that. Mingmin chipped away at the whole collection with a fine pick, going as slowly as possible, but she still finished reading everything by sophomore year. Just her luck.

Has she learned anything? Not really. If they paid her to read for a living, boy, she’d be rolling in money now. But right now, she just can’t stop thinking about what a waste the past three years have been. Your parents have tried to give you everything, Min, she tells herself. Why can’t you do a thing right? She gets up, paces around her bedroom. Her father had given her the computer on her desk when she begged him for it. Please, daddy, that’s all I want, she said—and his eyes softened.

He thinks she’s working on something right now. Min is beginning to have serious doubts as to whether that will ever happen. Oh why, why, WHY must she always be DOING something? Sometimes she wishes it would all just go away. She wants to do NOTHING. Because nothing she does really matters, does it? If only she could get away from all the voices in her head saying over and over, you have failed, you have failed, you have failed. If you’ve nothing worthwhile by now, you will amount to nothing. You just take up space. You are nothing, you are nothing, you are nothing…

If she died, nothing would bother her any more.

Mingmin sits down on her bed, panting in a cold sweat. She can’t go to sleep, not tonight. She turns on the computer screen, takes a deep breath, and starts writing. Her character’s name will be Chen, too—Chen Shiao Shuang. Shuangzi, or Frostie, for short.
Shuangzi is Min’s screen name on the campus network.

When I jumped, it wasn’t that I didn’t regret it.
But I’d already come this far, and jumping was merely a motion.
And really, I didn’t have any time to consider. Or you could say, I didn’t have any energy left to consider.
I had never thought about committing suicide before.
–opening lines of Detached Soul

~ ~ ~

Six years ago, Red Culture was a newly established publishing house looking to carve out a niche for itself in the cramped Taiwan print market. With nothing to lose, editor-in-chief Yeh Tzu-ling dedicated herself to finding a distinctly new, exciting voice in middle-brow fiction.

“Most of Taiwanese literature is at one of two extremes,” she said in a phone interview. “There is no gray area between high literature and trash. There is no urban literature, for example, and practically no detective fiction.”

One of her editors began to read First Encounters of the Intimate Kind, Tsai Chi-hung’s first endeavor, on the Internet. After reading half of it, she decided to print it out and pass it around the office.

“He has a very good grasp of language, but he keeps it simple,” said Yeh. “It’s a campus story, very close to real life experience. The novel tells a story speaks the same language as students, so that there is no generation gap.” Yeh wanted to reach the student and young twenty-some readership, and First Encounters seemed like it might be exactly what she was looking for.

The company did briefly wonder whether the novel would take off, seeing as it was still available on the internet. But most of Yeh’s acquaintances, for example, had never heard of Lame-O Tsai—Tsai’s pseudonym on the campus BBS internet network. Most people beyond college age would be reading his work for the first time—and if they had seen it online, they may have had the impulse to print it out first, like the editor who discovered the book.

In the late 90s, the Internet had not yet become integral to life in Taiwan. The only people who knew anything about the Web were the students, who were connected island-wide through a network called BBS, also called the electronic Bulletin. The BBS was a network maintained jointly by national universities. It had email and messaging capabilities, as well as a basic forum function. Because transmitting images were still beyond the technology of the network, everything is conducted in pure text format. Instead of exchanging images or mp3s, students went online and told jokes. Some, addicted to instant messaging, spent hours each day staring at their screens, chatting with other students around the island.

As a Chinese major, Chen Mingmin, or Shuangzi, as she would have been known on BBS, was an exception. Most of the people who “played computer” were science and engineering students who knew their way around computers. Nevertheless, someone started a forum called the Story page, and that was where Tsai began to post his serial novel as a graduate student in engineering in 1997.

The story was a romance between a graduate student in engineering, whose screen name was Lame-O Tsai, and an unnamed girl whose screen name was FlyinDance. Despite the somewhat melodramatic plot, in which the beautiful FlyinDance dies of a mysterious disease, Yeh locked onto Tsai’s clever word play, especially in scenes mostly comprised of instant messaging. Here was a concept foreign to most print readers at the time: a virtual love story.

Tsai suffused cyberspace with the possibilities of romance. Words on a screen seem to have such a tenuous hold on real life and real emotion, but somehow, Tsai makes flirting online believable. The two main characters are attracted to each other by the pure strength of the written word. When they meet in person, it is the language of their online conversations that comes to life and draws them close.

To Yeh, Tsai’s work was exciting. It wasn’t written in the formulaic style of romance novels of the time—it was fresh, it was almost edgy, and most importantly, it spoke for a so far voiceless generation. She signed a contract with Tsai. Soon afterwards, she discovered several other writers of Tsai’s acquaintance, and among them was a college junior named Chen Mingmin.

“The style of each of our writers is still very clear,” she said. “It has to do with their personalities, and how they rise out of the page. It has to do with their honesty to themselves, and not the market.” Nevertheless, First Encounters was a wild financial success when it first hit the shelves in 1998. Startled by the sudden entrance of a new “web literature,” established publishing companies scrambled to find “web writers” of their own.

~~~

I never understood why some people like to drink a silly thing like alcohol. Like Dad—he always likes to knock back a few in his spare time. Of course, he doesn’t drink beer. It’s usually something high class like brandy.
Dad says, only people who have suffered can contemplate the fragrance of alcohol. I guess to him, I’m the type that just can’t understand.
--Detached Soul

Shuangzi cannot believe that she has just landed a book contract with a publishing house. Her father tries not to look proud, but she can tell he’s hiding a smile beneath all that scoffing. A real book deal, with Yeh Tzu-Ling, no less—Yeh Tzu-Ling, who wrote Crush (on the) Peach Blossom Spring. A real writer! And more importantly, a legitimate Culture Person who has written Literature! Dad always wanted to be a writer himself, but he never found the time. And here she is at twenty-one, on the brink of achieving his lifelong dream. She will write something for him to be proud of. No longer will her life be a list of failures.

It has been a year since she began working on Detached Soul, and she is nearly finished posting it as a serial on BBS. The wandering soul of her suicidal protagonist has taken over the living body of another dying girl, and Shuangzi has written herself into a new appreciation of life. It’s hard to believe she ever wanted to die. If she had nothing else, the fan mail would be enough to convince her that life was worth living. Emails almost everyday from people she’s never met in person, including Lame-O Tsai himself. She has him to thank for sending in her manuscript.

Shuangzi writes her next book, Holey Socks, within a month, and it becomes her first book in print. This time, she writes a light story, a campus romance about a girl who is completely mortified when a mysterious upperclassman catches a glimpse of the holes in her socks. He then proceeds to pursue her on the internet, flooding her inbox with persistent notes of affection. She, of course, shows him no mercy. Who does he think he is, anyway? The most infuriating person she’s ever met.

Although Holey Socks does not quite reach the peak of fame of First Encounters after its launch on Christmas day of 1999, reader response is more enthusiastic than what Shuangzi knows how to deal with. She gets interviewed for a newspaper article on “web literature,” the new voice of fiction. Her inbox floods daily—not with amorous overtures, but with notes of admiration.
Shuangzi writes on and on, writes without pausing, writes without thinking. She turns on the computer, and the words flow out of her brain onto the screen, flowing into sentences, stories, and novels. Oh, dear Buddha, oh, dear God—the words she pours out of her brain are made of pure gold!

The next book comes almost as quickly as the first. Carpooling is another campus love story, nice and smooth. Nothing easier. She has graduated by now, so she spends her free time writing and wondering what to do Her father begs her not to be a writer, even though he admits it used to be his pipe dream, because no daughter of his is going to be starving on the streets. There’s no future in that, he says again and again, but he spends hours checking over the proofs of her new book. He is a copyeditor by profession.

Three days before the publication of the novel, Shuangzi’s father does not wake up. In the middle of the night, he simply stopped breathing.

“You know, it’s strange,” she wrote in retrospect. “I never wrote a light, humorous novel again. Maybe everyone has to grow up, some time.”

That year, Shuangzi interns as a Chinese teacher in high school. She hates it with a passion. She starts revising Detached Soul for print publication, and it is the only thing she looks forward to in her life. On December 31st, 2001, copies of her third novel are shipped to bookstores around the island. Some of the first letters she receives in response are from parents, who thank her for helping them understand why a young woman might contemplate suicide.

~ ~ ~

“Make no mistake, web novels are a campus romance genre,” says Lee Yuhua of Eslite Bookstores. “It’s the young readership that fuels the craze. It speaks to them, because they like to read something close to their own experiences.” From a retail perspective, web novels fill a certain niche, bringing young readers into bookstores.

But is moving beyond campus life the death of web novels? Are writers like Shuangzi doomed to fizzle out during the transition from college life to the workplace?

To Tsai Chi-hung, that would be the true tragedy. According to him, the relationship between web literature and campus romance is purely incidental. Stories on the web are about campus life because, well, the only people posting are students in college and graduate school. “If you go to a fruit stand, you will see fruit,” he says in a phone interview. His voice sounds exactly like his prose: logical and convincing, but filled with unexpected analogies and figurative language.

“No one dictates what can and cannot be posted on the internet,” says Tsai. “It’s really the publishing companies that are pigeonholing web lit for more convenient marketing.” In a traditional publishing company in Taiwan, genre editors select the books that will fit in their series. Starting a new, undefined line of books would simply be risky business.

“More importantly, publishers just don’t understand web culture,” adds Tsai. “Most of them have a traditional literary training, and don’t get web jokes. The bottom line is, they don’t think web literature can be very good.” In his opinion, the publishing world has been forced to accept web literature because it sells—but they don’t like it, one bit. The first run of a typical “literary” work is usually 2000-3000 copies. For a web novel, 5000 copies would be a mark of failure. At Red Culture’s estimate, Tsai’s books sell up to 100,000 copies each.

Sadly, it may be that the popularity of web novels will lead to their ultimate downfall. “When I was writing at first, it was pure venting. I wasn’t writing to create fiction, or art,” Tsai says. True enough: given the chance to construct an alter ego, he went the way of self-deprecation instead of pretension with Lame-O Tsai. “If were all having our portrait taken,” he says suddenly, “I would have been smiling a natural smile in my picture. Kids nowadays—they smile the perfect smile, the smile they think matches the ideal smile that they’ve seen in old photographs.” Young writers who want to be picked up by publishers, in other words, tailor their works to existing expectations of web literature. They are conscious of the market research. They know what’s out there.

Yeh Tzu-ling agrees. “It’s a terrible cycle, really. The publishing houses are looking to cash in on what they see as the Web Novel craze, and they’re paying young writers to do mediocre, boring work. The writers don’t know any better—and they get to fulfill their dream of being a published author. ‘Web literature’ as a genre becomes more and more formulaic by the year.”

And after two or three books, after the giddiness of being published runs out of steam, most young writers give up. They find real jobs, and never write a story again.

Those who do continue writing, says Yeh, are usually enjoy writing for its own sake. They all have day jobs, perhaps jobs in which they are equally invested, but they reserve a special part of themselves for creative work. “Some writers, like Shuangzi, stay on long enough to mature and to push themselves as writers, as creative people, ” she says. “Being amateurs, they have freedom to develop themselves as they wish.”

~ ~ ~

Before I wrote this novel, I stopped writing for two years. During these two years, with the exception of some short stories, I was unable to write a thing. I had reached a bottleneck, and it was easy to explain: I was unsatisfied. Unsatisfied with the fact that everything I wrote sounded the same, unsatisfied with my standards, unsatisfied with anything coming out of my pen. I could force myself to write, and something would come out, but if I made writing into a routine, then my novels would become consumer products, and I would become a machine.
--Author’s Preface, Princess Yourong, by Shuangzi

In 2002, after publishing her fourth novel, a contemplation of losing a loved one entitled The Disappearing Light, Shuangzi can’t write anymore. She is still spinning characters and plots and words, spinning like crazy, but there is nothing there. She can’t stand to read her own novels. The reader feedback still surprises her every day, even supporting her maturing style and heavy subject matter. But as much as it fed her need for recognition, fame poisons her writing. Bit by bit, she is writing herself into a corner. She cannot write anything else but what she has always written, and she begins to hate herself. Shuangzi feels, for the first time since she began to write Detached Soul, completely paralyzed. Some days she doesn’t even know if she ever wants to write again.

So Shuangzi decides to take a big, fat, break from writing. She decides to go back to her old hobby: reading big, fat novels.

It was the one pastime she shared with her dad when she was young. Every two or three months, he would take her to the local San Min Bookstore and give her 500 NT (about $20 USD) to buy books. She could choose anything, anything she wanted.

Of course, that meant she picked the most fantastically long, most incomprehensible books possible. One time she dragged a particularly heavy tome to the counter, a gargantuan copy of the Dreams of the Red Chambers. Her father had guffawed—shouldn’t she maybe be getting an abridged version, at least? But there was a glint of pride in his eye, and Min was set on getting her money’s worth. She had figured out long ago that since she had a fixed budget, the thickest books were the most economical choices, with the most pages per NT dollar. Besides, she’d show him. She’d plough through that book quicker than anything, and then wouldn’t he be surprised.

Min didn’t end up understanding everything in the Red Chambers, not then—but then, she was often confused by what she read. It didn’t matter. The confusion was all a part of the exhilaration. Knowing that something just beyond her comprehension was hanging there, incomprehensible and marvelous: that was much, much more exciting than homework.
Dad tried to get her to stop reading during her homework time. But she was too sneaky for him. She would steal his books from the study and read them before he got home from work. His favorite novels used to be the Wu Xia novels of Jin Yong, because really, no one could every beat Jin Yong. He was the Dickens of mid-20th century Hong Kong who could transport you to a distant land, where the martial arts heroes lived and died. He had that marvelous classical style in his bones. And his novels often took eight normal-sized volumes to contain all their magnificence. Min used to snatch the tomes left at home, speed-reading to finish them before Dad returned. Sometimes she read the volume five and six in one dizzying breath, and sometimes she read fourth volume before she did the first, cheering at the ending before she knew whom she was cheering for. Understanding what she read seemed hardly the point when reading itself was such an adventure.

But now Min is twenty-five, and Dad—well, Dad wouldn’t be coming back from work any more. Now, she is Shuangzi, and she is a writer, and she is sick of her own books. She wants to go back to the days of the $500 NT rule. The days when reading was an undercover mission, a guilty pleasure, a pure and confusing joy.

~ ~ ~

In person, Shuangzi looks disappointingly ordinary. The somewhat archaic connotations of her pseudonym in Chinese suggests some tall goddess, with a touch of tragedy in her cold, beautiful face. Chen Mingmin wears a loose t-shirt and no make-up when she’s out buying books. Her hair lies limp in a scraggly ponytail. A sensible pair of glasses perch just above the round of her cheeks.

When she speaks, her manner is no less blunt and down-to-earth. “The age group of web lit readers is going down steadily,” she says, the picture of an analyst giving a consumer report, “and in general the whole genre is going the way of romance novels, where nothing new is ever written.” After a short stint in the publishing industry, Chen knows her statistics. Web novels, like the cutesy romances that still flood the Taiwan market, target women in the age groups 12-17 and 35-40, and it’s no accident—those are the ages that women tend to be the loneliest.

“The question is whether it is possible to move out of the darkness and into the light,” Chen says, softening. She still believes in posting new work on the internet, partly out of loyalty to her roots, and partly because she likes getting initial feedback before everything goes into print. It doesn’t matter that 99% of the stuff posted online is crap, because Shuangzi the writer has stopped defining herself as a web writer.

“I don’t think about what web literature is. I think what I want to write,” she says in full earnest. “I want to be my own brand, with my own style, beyond artificial limits.” To remove herself from constant market pressure, she supports herself with a full-time job and writes in her spare time. “It’s a secondary occupation, but one that I care about intensely. It’s where I challenge myself to be more.”

Chen comes alive when she begins to talk about books that she loves. She will offer to suggest readings to anyone who asks—and indeed, she posts recommendations of her latest favorites on her website whenever she can. She is exploring the sense of psychological pressure in Mainland Chinese novelists. Before she wrote her latest two-volume novel, Princess Yourong, she read copious amounts of historical fiction, at which Mainland writers excel. That sweeping, powerful emotion and heroic scale—the best of it was the most incredible, most exciting reading experience she had ever had. If she could write something like Wang Xufeng’s trilogy, she would die with no regrets.

It may take her decades, but Chen knows it will happen. At 27, she’s got plenty to live for, and she’s in no hurry. Some day, she’s going to write her own $500 NT book. And when that day comes, when she is finally satisfied with a book of her own, she will know it is priceless.

Asylum--Journalistic essay on Chinese exiles in Paris on the 15th year anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre

2004-12-07T15:21:00.000-05:00

Asylum

By Evelyn Shih

You should see those bloody pictures, everyone is whispering. Look at the newspaper cuttings, the photographs of students camping out on the public square, and short obituaries of those who died at twenty-five, twenty one, seventeen. Images of demonstrations and sympathy parades around the world, the mess of a makeshift protest that grew week by week, the moment of emergency and chaos captured by hysterical camera flashes in the night. The vigils that followed.
The photographs are carefully assembled and pasted on poster board, lined up against the raised curb of the Square of Human Rights, la Place des Droits de L’Homme, Paris, France. They wobble, perched on wooden sticks among occasionally strewn white roses, some knocked askew by the wind. This is not a vigil for civilian victims of a terrorist attack, or a protest against the U.S. war in Iraq. Today’s commemoration is an exercise in history. In case you’ve been able to forget, today is June Fourth, 2004, the big Six-Four, the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.
In the wee hours of the morning on June 4, 1989, Zhang Jian and his small student patrol were alerted to disturbances on one end of Tiananmen Square. They quickly mobilized and rushed to the scene, where they were met by tanks and armed soldiers. Zhang and his patrol took the brunt of that first, early attack. Out of the students in his ambulance, he was the only one who survived, and there is a bullet permanently lodged in his thigh.
Wang Loumeng, Zhang’s translator, stands next to him on the raised curb where the photographs lean. Behind them is a proud dark blue banner: “In Memory of Six Four” in Chinese, subscript “La Memoire de 15e Anniversaire du ‘4 Juin.’ ” Wang raises his loudspeaker to explain to the Paris commemorators, both French and Chinese, that the poster he holds in his other hand shows Zhang, then 18, on Tiananmen Square. “I was just so tired that I lay down,” said Zhang. Students had the public square staked out since mid-April in a sustained attempt to force comprehensive government reform. On the night of June 3rd, Zhang had lain down to take what rest he could, not knowing the terror and complete pandemonium that would come all too soon.
Zhang did not have the benefit of retrospect, but fifteen years later, retrospect is all that I have. At the time of the Tiananmen Massacre, I was five and a half. The event is a dark spot in my memory only as a few blurry images on the television that seemed to upset my parents. I have since learned the historical context, and understand intellectually that the massacre came as shock to the international community because of the cold-blooded murder of young idealists, and because up to that night, the Chinese Communist Party had given the world reason to believe it was in the process of reform. It was supposed to be leaving the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution behind, moving away from autocracy. The students were not the only victims of disillusionment.
Today, fifteen years later, I cannot go to Tiananmen Square, where history occurred, and commemorate the young people who gave their lives for the cause of democracy. I cannot go because the government of China refuses to admit the term “massacre.” I cannot go because according to Reporters Without Borders, the term “Six-Four,” which has come to stand for the horrors of the Tiananmen Massacre, is dangerous to utter in China up to this day. To speak freely of what occurred fifteen years ago is asking to be arrested.
So I have come to this windy evening gathering, on a different Square, where veterans of Tiananmen like Wang Loumeng and Zhang Jian have come together in a public act of remembering and reconstruction. They, too, are barred from Tiananmen: they are exiles, taken in by the French government as refugees because they faced imprisonment or worse if they were to have stayed in China.
Wang, a long-time Paris resident, is one of the main organizers of the event. He works at one of the Chinese-language papers in Paris, and has been appointed one of the translators for the evening because of his good French. Translating is key tonight because French activist organizations such as Amnesty Internationale, Reporters Sans Frontiers, and Libere Tibet are co-sponsors, and are responsible for bringing out a third of the audience. The French presence is welcome here—it means that someone out there still cares—but it also means that the rally speeches take twice as long. At any given time, either the French or the Chinese who are present do not know what is going on. There is an undercurrent of low conversation buzzing through the crowd.
In a spare moment, Wang drifts over to the circle where I stand with a group of his colleagues at the newspaper. They always see each other at these events. He shifts his loudspeaker under his arm and points out a skinny mid-30s woman belted down by several different cases of recording equipment.
She was just a student on Tiananmen Square, back then, we walked around and we tried to record everything—he pauses, wistful. She doesn’t want anyone to know. But what a warrior she was.
“She was my girlfriend, you know, back then,” he murmurs to us as if reliving a dream, and turns to go with his Mandarin-collar shirt whipping behind him. He must focus on his duties. Old emotions may come unbidden at moments such as these, but in Paris, France, commemoration is hard work.

The political exiles who fled China in the wake of Tiananmen make up only a small part of the Chinese population in Paris, a city in which Chinatown dominates the 13th quarter. They came because the French government, like the American government, provided asylum. Legitimate political refugees are eligible for reductions in phone services, health insurance and public transportation, all provided by the French welfare system. They have a pension to live on.
It would seem that they are the lucky ones. Not only have they escaped imprisonment in China, but they also have a source of steady, if low, income as they enter a new country. By comparison, the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian immigrants who came decades earlier are often illegal immigrants who had to slave their way up the ghetto hierarchy in factories, restaurants, and laundromats.
Yet exile, in the end, is a difficult fate. Unlike immigrants, the exiles never meant to leave their home countries. They fought for the rights of their families, their countrymen, their people. They were supposed to be the heroes of China. But China rejected their mode of patriotism, and forced them out of Tiananmen.
In Paris, it is they who have the burden of proving to the Chinese community that it is worth it to come to the 15th year anniversary of the Massacre. Come, they have to say. Come even if you have no wish to return to China, even if your children only speak French and you are happy with your life. Come, because even if you have better things to do, you are Chinese.

Ouyang Pai was not on the list of guest speakers, but when organizer Tsai Chongguo opened up the floor to comments from the audience, he stepped up, a sheaf of notes in hand. Ouyang is a man wearing tweed, tinted glasses and side burns out of the seventies, lined squares on his collared shirt like graph paper. A physics professor, a calligrapher. He riffles through his pages, adjusts his lenses, waves off Tsai. He’ll translate himself.
Says he’s the Chairman of the Green Party of China, and on behalf of the LEAGUE of overseas democracy warriors…
I cringe on reflex. That voice, those opening lines, are uncannily familiar.
He’s talking, in a sort of college professor voice, about the three political assassination attempts on his life—three assassination conspiracies by the government of France since he arrived here in 1987, he’s saying, like he did last time. Tsai tries to take the microphone away, trying to maintain some composure because people are still watching. You must translate, he tells Ouyang.
But Ouyang won’t let go, and the microphone is picking up an embarrassing amount of what is going on. “Why won’t you let me talk? You only like hearing the French talk, is that right?” We must stand up for each other, don’t you understand, because no one will. The French will not. The words echo in my mind—where have I heard this all before?
What’s going on?—the whispers begin. He’s completely gone, isn’t he. Look at him fighting Tsai for the microphone. “Just let me finish!” he’s yelling.
“I am Ouyang Pai” his voice rings out just before Tsai pulls the plug out of the amp, an action greeted by a flurry of mortified laughter. Get him out of there. Don’t let him spoil everything. We are not crazy.

Ouyang’s performance is nothing new for those who spend time in the Parisien Chinese exile circle. Even I, a relative outsider, had an uncomfortable feeling of déja vu. I had last seen Ouyang at a talk about three weeks earlier at the Librarie Phénix, a bookstore that specializes in East Asian literature and sells books in the original language. The talk, featuring high profile dissident Hu Ping, drew a similar crowd to the one on La Place des Droits de L’Hommes. An influential post-Tiananmen writer and thinker now based in New York, Hu Ping was presenting his new book La Pensée Manipulée: Le Cas Chinois[1].
Ouyang got ahold of the microphone when the floor was opened for questions, and would not let go. He refused to translate, addressing Hu Ping and the Chinese members of the audience in a fatherly tone.
“Mr. Hu Ping is familiar to us democracy activists as a first-rate democracy philosopher,” he said, almost jovial. “So we are very happy to be able to meet him on his visit to France. And I represent the Chinese Green Party—I’m the chairman, Ouyang Pai, Chinese Green Party—and the Alliance for Chinese Overseas Power recruiter and representative—I would like to say on the behalf of all European and French Chinese democracy activists, that we welcome him to France.”
He refused to be deterred until he had had his say, fighting the panelists and the storeowner for control of the floor. By pure force of voice, he finally reached the end of what he had to say: “IS OUR STRUGGLE AFFECTING THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY?”
By now, a white-haired French lady in the audience has sat long enough in quiet. Happy to have a comprehensible phrase to fight with, she issued a retort that was drowned in Ouyang’s answer, his voice tearing like raw wood, “Le gouvernement de France a essayé trois fois de m’assassiner![2]”
I took a deep breath. I had been sitting next to Ouyang before the speeches began, and had moved to a seat on the floor as the room filled with seniors. He had given me his business card when he found out that I was a journalist, and asked me to help him with his demonstration extravaganza on the fourth of June. He had asked for my number.

“I wanted to warn you, but I couldn’t do that at the time,” says Jiang Jingshi as we sit at an outdoor table of a café in the 13th quarter, blocks from the heart of China town. Jiang is balding, dressed like my father with a polo shirt and belted pants, but his shirt is thinning. He’s got the look of a man who makes his clothes last, but he insists on treating me to something to drink—because he can afford that, and because it is courtesy. He orders two coffees from the waiter in a broken immigrant’s French.
“There are too many like Ouyang,” said Jiang. “More than people know. The pressure is very great, and things fall apart. You are loyal to a country, but the country does not want you. If your parents are dying, you cannot go back. Not unless you write a recantation of your political beliefs. So you cannot maintain both your integrity and your filial piety. You know Tsai Chongguo? We had to persuade him not to go back when his father was dying last year. ”
Only three years out of China, Jiang owns a farm just outside of Paris, selling produce to Chinese restaurants and groceries. He’d worked as a freelance reporter in China, and only left because “a friend who was in prison needed help getting out of the country.” Now, at his farm, he hosts gatherings for “culture people,” many of them intellectuals who were in China at the time of Tiananmen. He is also in the process of starting a Chinese-language Parisian metro newspaper.
“If you compare France to Germany, there are less papers per capita,” he says. Having something to read is at a premium for people who are reduced by circumstances to manual labor. Without the language skills to have an intellectually challenging career, writers like Jiang could end up starching shirts in a factory or gutting fish. It’s no surprise that Wang Loumeng, Tsai Chongguo, and many of their friends found work at an existing Chinese newspaper.
“It’s a basic problem of survival,” Jiang added. “When you get here, no one can help anyone else. Everyone is in trouble. It’s very hard to start anything, keep any sort of community together.” That’s why Jiang believes that Paris needs another Chinese newspaper—so that people who are falling through the cracks, be they whores or factory workers or activists, get attention and perhaps a helping hand from kind readers.
Jiang truly believes in building a greater Chinese community. My first impulse as a member of an ethnic minority in America is to wonder whether self-segregation is such a good idea. But Jiang was not an economic immigrant. He did not consider himself French, and never would.
I finish my coffee, and he insists that I have something more. “Jus d’orange, s’il vous plait,” I say to a waiter has he passes. I am still shaky standing on my two years of French language exposure, but I can order food fairly well. Besides, the waiters are accustomed to tourists.
“You have very good French,” says Jiang.

I asked Marie Holzman, sinologist and long-time activist for democracy in China, how it was that so many Chinese exiles could survive in Paris with a minimal grasp of French.
“For adults, in many ways the French society is very tolerant,” said Marie. “Because there’s nothing you can do about it. They don’t want to study French, they don’t want to buy a baguette…they don’t, you know? Nobody is going to force them to do that.”
Marie has been working to help political asylees into the country since before I was born. She is fluent in Chinese, and is one of their loudest French advocates. Technically an academic by trade, she doesn’t stop at studying China in the abstract. She is an old friend of both Wang Loumeng and Tsai Chongguo. It was she who brought Wei Jingsheng, perhaps the most internationally famous of Chinese dissident exiles, to Paris for the 15th anniversary commemoration. She was present on the panel in the Librairie Phénix. She was the translator of Hu Ping’s book.
Marie knows the exile community and the problems it faces, because she has befriended it. “France will never be home,” she said. “Even if they live here, even if they never intend to go back, this is not home. And you feel it intensely. They are not attuned to the life here.” It is possible for exiles, she says, to live unemployed on the government pension indefinitely. Without a mandate to engage with French society, some exiles become permanently disconnected with the world around them.

Once upon a time, Ouyang was once a respected man, an intellectual at the top of his field—or at least, I imagine him that way. He could speak, uninterrupted by translations, to a sea of his countrymen, and they would applaud. He spoke for freedom of thought, for democracy and for justice.
But suddenly, the world contracted. The students mowed down in the flower of their youth on that terrible night, and then everyone was a criminal. His life was in danger. That was when he came to France, which was supposed to be a temporary thing. Oh, the French were alright, perhaps, but they but a little too much stock in their own importance.
And to them, Ouyang would never be eloquent. He would never be the man lecturing to a sea of adoring students. There were only so few people who could hear for themselves what he said, and adore him for it. The ones who truly understood, exiles themselves, were even fewer. Maybe a couple of them would get together for mah-jong or drink and sing Beijing opera songs, but when those were over, there was nothing left.
Ouyang doesn’t remember when they stopped letting him talk at public events, but he does remember each time the French tried to kill him. Oh, yes, he remembers all too well. And dammit if they will kill his spirit. That’s the only thing left. Because someday he will return to China, and they will welcome him as a hero, their own democracy warrior.
Then the French will hang their heads in shame.

How many Ouyangs are there in Paris? I found myself wondering. How many in the world? Overturning the Chinese Communist Party from abroad is beyond David and Goliath. That fight, at least, was a one-time deal; after fifteen years of devastating defeat, what sane person would continue to believe in victory?
Even today’s commemoration was a defeat. It was originally planned as a march from La Place des Droits des L’Hommes to the Chinese Embassy. Three days previous to the event, Tsai Chongguo received a call from the Paris police, and was duly informed that the protest march could not take place because of security concerns. President George Bush of America was to arrive June 5th for the D-Day commemoration, and there was a perceived threat of terrorist attack.
The next day at a press conference for the event, Tsai would announce new plans for a smaller, more sedentary demonstration. Marie translated his words into Chinese for Wei Jingsheng, the featured speaker, Chinese democracy activist based in Washington, DC. He had come to Paris solely for this purpose.
When he saw that Tsai had finished, he asked for a few minutes to make a comment on the sudden change. “As for this matter, although have no proof, we can pretty much estimate that the French government, after receiving pressure from the Chinese Embassy, found an inexplicable excuse to do this,” Wei said in a calm Beijing accent.
“French people have always prided themselves on being the most courageous people, and the one that respects human rights the most. This incident is very embarrassing. By this year’s Six-Four disgrace, the French government has become the most cowardly Western nation, the most indifferent to human rights issues.” Fighting words. He paused for Marie to translate.
“Americans also have business with China, and are afraid of China, but they’ve never done anything so disgraceful as this. Not even small countries, not even Japan, or Hong Kong, which is under Chinese control, dare to say we cannot have this peaceful commemoration. On behalf of your country, your French president has made you into the most boastful of pitiful cowards.”
Among Chinese dissidents, Wei is one of the most internationally known, and he knew that if anyone were to be quoted at the press conference, it would be him. Beginning in 1979, on the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, Wei openly publicized criticisms of Deng Xiaoping and the Communist Party, demanding change. After he authored “The Fifth Modernization,” an essay on democracy whose title parodies the government’s official slogan of “the four modernizations,” he was taken into solitary confinement on the charge of passing military secrets concerning the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war to a foreigner and of engaging in "counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement". He was subsequently jailed for 15 years, and was only released in 1997 due to his failing health and international outcry. Seven years out and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination under his belt, Wei is looking decidedly heavier.
He is also the only other man besides Ouyang who gave me his business card, unsolicited. “The Overseas Chinese Democracy Coalition, Chairman. Wei Jingsheng Foundation, President,” I read.
What is the difference between Wei Jingsheng and Ouyang Pai? Why is it that when Ouyang speaks in anger, it is an embarrassment, and when Wei does the same, it is greeted with respect?

It’s not that Wei doesn’t want to go home. In fact, he cherishes the dream of returning to China.
“I think about it every day,” he said. “There is not a moment when I forget. But if I go back, it’d be to do prison time, wouldn’t it.” And then he chuckled ruefully, as if that is just one of those things you can’t think about.
Wei seemed strangely at peace with the fact that he may never go home, especially considering the fact that he recently lost his father. He, like Tsai Chongguo, was not at his father’s side to say his last goodbyes.
For a man who has just called the president of France a disgrace to the civilized world, he was also extraordinarily understanding of Chirac.
“He needs things from the Chinese government, and he does what he must to get them. He doesn’t actually trust them at all.” Wei compared it to the support of the Chinese Embassy by overseas Chinese. “They’re out of hot water,” he said. “They say to themselves why not, it’s not going to hurt me, I may as well cash in. The embassies have been known to pay Chinese immigrants for attendance at events welcoming Party leaders. Bring your old papa and your new baby. They pay by the head.”
He warmed up into colloquialisms as we spoke. If you asked him, the worst fault of Chinese youth today was that they did not know about the mistakes of the past. I found myself knee to knee with him across a small wooden table in a noodle shop of the 1st Quarter of Paris for lunch.
Learning that I was a budding journalist, Wei took it upon him to warn me about media manipulation. Known within the overseas Chinese community for having connections in Washington, he is often called upon to rescue political prisoners who have run afoul of the Communist Party. To get them out quickly, Wei speaks with sympathetic congressmen, yes, but he also relies heavily upon the media.
If you blitz the media with stories of a political dissident suffering torture at the hands of the autocratic Chinese regime, you can play up public sympathy. Usually this means that the U.S. government will put pressure upon Chinese politicians. The political dissidents in question are often released with much hype in international media, painted as heroes.
But you can’t trust that they have heroic motives. “There are people, I won’t say who, that go back to the country with the express intent of becoming international sensations. They count on me getting them out in the nick of time,” said Wei.
You have to see the media for what it is, he told me. It likes a good story. And even reporters in America can’t print something their editors don’t want.
No one in Congress will help you out of the goodness of their heart. You have to work the loopholes, beg, borrow, steal the tender mercies of legislators; pray. And if you make enough noise, you will see the effects. With one assistant helping him run HQ in Washington, he writes letters every day, corresponds with anyone who will help him put pressure on the Chinese Communist Party to give just a little more freedom to those still in the country. People are lazy. People are greedy and they’re bastards, but in the end you live with your own conscience. And if you’re clean, it doesn’t matter if you’re in hell. Just stop trying to get to heaven, and realize this is what you have to do.

The sun is setting on La Place des Droits des Hommes. The faithful who did venture out of their homes for the commemoration finally have no reason left to linger. The incident is over: someone has mysteriously ushered Ouyang away, and he will soon be forgotten. He is an anti-climax, and the energy that had begun to dissolve before he even began to speak is now completely dissipated in the rosy skies behind the Eiffel Tower.
You will not see my picture on the posters that Wang Loumeng is gathering from the curb. Tonight, I am the one taking notes, trying to record everything on this Square like Wang and his girlfriend did on Tiananmen. I watch the white roses tumble away across the square, caught by a wind that is too cold for June.
This scene is desolate, not because of a massacre, but because it never really got started. At the height of the commemoration, one-fourth of La Place des Droits des L’Hommes would have been enough to hold the loose crowd.
I have come too late for the historic moments, and I am too far from hell to know what it is to desire heaven. But there are bits that I will remember fifteen years from now. There will be the wind; there will be my first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower; and there will be men who channel their pain into incomprehensible shouts in the dark, believing someone out there is listening.

[1] The Manipulation of Thought: The Chinese Case, or The Domestication of the Human: Evasions and Rebellions from a literal translation of the Chinese title
[2] The Government of France has tried three times to kill me!

The Poem that Summer told me

2004-10-01T23:22:00.000-05:00

The Wreck Next to the Legislative Yuan

Twisted iron worms sleep standing, finally breathing
Open air in disembowelment. I turn, expose
my back to that gaping, undone architecture, to a relic
I don’t know. I must cross.
He waves me over to the unshaded side of the street, into noon,
Below his casque a harsh face, sunned, sweated brown.
I comply, silent. A chorus is static, cicadas
Like any other day, like a silly chirping grind
Like those who suit themselves, static and chirping
Always silly in the Yuan beyond. Do they breathe? Sweat drips hot
From my face. A block of shivering sides
lumbers past, carrying no one, roaring tremors into the metal
of my sun umbrella stem
like a sudden heartbeat in the dead
heat. I turn the corner, walk on, beat
the next bus to the stop.

*NOTE: The Legislative Yuan is the congressional building of Taiwan, located in Taipei. Yuan is a word that means at once institution and courtyard.

Photo Essay Featuring My Mother

2004-09-11T00:02:00.000-05:00

I present to you my mom--she's the youngest person in our family at heart, despite being the oldest in age. Here, she not only amuses herself with umbrellas, but she sends the rest of us into fits of giggles by virtue of her sheer silliness and the infectiousness of her warm heart. Sometimes when things get to be too much, and the stakes seem too high in life, I just have to think of her. And I have to smile.

Mom imagines how ridiculous she looks . You can see her giggling on the inside.

up, down, up! parade!

yay! look at me!

Look, she got Dad to be silly too. Y for Yale, of course

Haha, I made him be silly

Dad filming me from within a grove

And back to the car. Adventure's over.

In Chinese, one word for "happy" translates literally as "open heart." And someone who always brings happiness to a group of people is a "open heart fruit." Fruit is also the word for consequence, or result--a dead metaphor, you might say. My mother is the open-heart fruit in our family in more ways than one--we all pour our hearts out to her, and she helps us untie those uncooperative knots that are crusting over inside. And then she cheers us up. Whether we want to, or not. But sometimes she takes the pain into her own heart, and needs someone to open it up in turn.

You give too much to us, Mom.

The Plath in Me

2004-08-29T10:30:00.000-05:00

I was telling a friend yesterday about how I discovered I had Plathian sympathies during my poetry course, which surprised me a great deal--it was like discovering my "dark side." One word that people in my class said about my poems a lot, especially near the end of the semester, was "intense." I usually come off as sunny or cute, whatever that means, so below I have put together a few poems I wrote last semester that seem to show my alternate personality. I made some revisions on the first one recently, although I'm not convinced that I'm *completely* satisfied with any of these efforts.

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Dried Flowers:
the eighth consciousness of being and the cycle of reincarnation
1.
Did you always mean to end all this? Today the thought came easy, sliding
in, the sudden brinkless savagery of tearing petals off the bloom, sweet murder.

You gave me those flowers once, thinking I’d like the colors. Bravo, but no
thanks, I’m giving back your flowers dried and brittle with the weeks of hanging,

toe-up. These won’t stretch, resisting rips, won’t pulse through balmy little veins
becoming martyrs. I unwatered them all for you, so now the shape of buds

are fixed, are safe for touch, will snap and break into confetti, flake the earth.

2.
In time we too will fragment.

But look at me, my face forgettable, and pity me not
the time that I
must forget you clean and die. The pain
is always certain, and beneath this spread of sky,
this punctured dark

you drink
the hurt down with sweet dews. I’m telling
you & telling myself that no forever open bloom
exists because the blossoming exacts
too much for us
to see. Perfection screams and lies, claims
immortal the veiny curves of a brow, a lash,
an eye.
And if we cannot do the miracle,
discredited forever, we will hate it.
Do you tell me the unchanging truth?

3.
The eighth consciousness stores deeds
and there you matter beyond matter until
I let go and am and aren’t and was and will.
****************************************

New Statue
A letter to Ariel

Cut too deep
For unbloody words,
You were always
A woman, now you are form,
Curving marble,
Living. Unconcerned
About the nail
I hold, hammer-ready.
I want again
To hear you cry
Wolf through fissures
Hair-thin, never combed.

I can’t help if
I’m a child with tongues

Hot to be fed. I burn
Asphyxiated
In your breath,
Lemons, wines:
Someone gash the flow
Open, or I die
Unconceivable. Oh, too
Much, that field
Of red you’re selling
Me, eyes, mouth open wide
I can never swallow

What I want. It sticks,
Crumbled plaster in my throat,
Cardboard feta dripping
Dry vinegar. I am no woman. Perfect
Women die
In the vein of art.

***********************************************
Untitled

The motor sputters on and on through greened glass pipes.
Bubbles escape to settle on ceramic castles, plastic kelp.
A small orange mouth opens, swallowing dry surface air.

But the fin bumps against an unmoving float, round and white,
A yawn frozen at one end above two gray bulbs, and a tassel
Purple and blue at the other. An erstwhile friend.

No goodbyes, just a shoving off, swimming towards the wall.
Seeing other selves is nothing new or jarring, not cause to stop.
This is not the world. There is too much light, it is too still.

Post #1

2004-08-22T00:21:00.000-05:00

This blog has the earthy smell of road dust. With one breath you may take into your lungs the freshest batch, a mixed concoction of soil from three continents. This is a new blog for a new beginning, filled with travel and greenery, a trail of color, a trail of vibrance.

you have picked a flower mahjong tab. please pick again.

I have no idea what will grow here, or what the next pick will be. But that's the part that excites me. And at least I know that I am picking, and that it will be a tab.