The catch. A short story

Posted on June 15, 2013 by

The catch

“Well, what happened?”

“Let me tell the whole story from the start. She’s tall with glamorous movie star eyes, tits on the small side but a nice round set of hips. The first time we met she was wearing green army pants, the kind with all the pockets, a tight black shirt and sunglasses, which she took off as soon as we sat down in the café. That was important. If there’s one thing I can’t handle it’s people who don’t take their sunglasses off. I need to see someone’s face the first time I meet them. Hers turned out to be so attractive that I immediately assumed I didn’t stand a chance winging a second date out of her. In fact I wondered what someone of her breeding was doing seeking guys online in the first place.”

“Wow.”

“Well, we had dinner a few days later, and get this, she invited me to visit her mother’s home in Weihai, out on the Shandong coast, that very weekend! At first I was like, how weird, is this a marriage trap or something? And on such short notice? But then I thought, what the hell, maybe it will be fun, and it might speed up the process of getting into her pants. It might be the only way of getting into her pants. I spent three days there.” Continue reading →

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Good teacher, bad teacher. A short story

Posted on May 29, 2013 by

Good teacher 2

“How did you do that?”

“Watch again.” Fifty students stood around him craning their necks – some standing on chairs – as the teacher moved three walnut shells around the surface of a desk. “Now look,” he said, turning up each shell to show there was nothing underneath and putting them in a line with a pea sitting in front of the first shell.

He placed the center shell over the pea and pushed it forward. He moved the shell on his left to the center position, while shifting the center shell over to where the left shell had been. He overturned the center shell, now magically revealed to hold the pea that should have been under the left shell. The students gasped. Continue reading →

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Restaurant time warp. A short story

Posted on May 4, 2013 by

Restaurant

“I like the decor here. Look at the designs lit up on the wall by a hidden projector, and the silver mobiles over there, suspended in space like birds or fish. Notice the rafters in the ceiling above lighted blue. And that big black-and-white peony mural taking up the far wall.”

My date is ignoring me, swinging her leg back and forth under the table. She hands me the menu. It’s my first visit to the Little Kitchen, a moderately upscale Cantonese chain with ten Beijing branches listed on the wet wipe packet. On the Mainland, Cantonese food is distinguishable from other regional cuisines not so much by the ingredients used as by the greater clarity food achieves when prepared with less oil, salt, sugar and pepper.

“Can you give me an idea of what you’d like to eat?” I ask.

“No.”

Continue reading →

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Paradox. A short story

Posted on April 26, 2013 by

Paradox

To make the nude not look like a manikin, to make it vibrate with weight and hang with gravity, was mere entry level for any professional painter. But to embed light into the flesh, to render the nude not like a nude but a Renaissance still life with velvet bread, pristine pewter and glassware and grapes glowing like green suns, now that takes the caliber of a Lucian Freud to pull off. The show at the Downstream Gallery in Beijing’s 798 art district featured solitary, pensive ”human body” paintings popular in China in the 1980s-90s in imitation of Western photorealism, with the twist that the current painter had the insight to treat the nude like something else, something inanimate, oddly infusing the body with a greater realism and distinguishing his painting from those of his bland predecessors.

A young woman stood immobile before one of the canvasses for some minutes before snapping it with her Nikon Coolpix P510. As she left the gallery she pulled out her cellphone. “Hey, lovely, I’m so proud of you, posing nude for a painting! Why didn’t you tell me about it before? . . . What? Come on, no need to deny it. I think it’s cool. . . . Right here in an exhibit at 798. . . . Oh, it’s you all right, absolutely. I just took a picture of the painting and will show you when I get back. . . . But it’s definitely you, Nafei, without a doubt. I’ll see you in a while.”

Continue reading →

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The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Anglo travelogues of China

Posted on April 16, 2013 by

Liam D'Arcy-Brown, The Emperor's River: Travels to the Heart of a Resurgent China (Eye Books, 2010)Let’s start with Liam D’Arcy-Brown’s Grand Canal voyage The Emperor’s River: Travels to the Heart of a Resurgent China (2010). A great idea, certainly, traversing the entire Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, especially as no one else, at least in our day, seems to have tackled the challenge. It is no longer possible to do so by water, with large stretches presently bone dry. Starting at Hangzhou, the author hitched or bribed rides on coal barges that took him up the canal for brief spells, while taxis and buses took him further along on nearby roads. Elsewhere, suspicious police stopped him and sent him back, forcing him to loop around to get to the next point up the canal, and eventually to its terminus at Beijing. Despite the fractured route and the monotony of the scenery, there is – as with that other momentous landmark, the Great Wall – a great deal of potential interest: the 1,500-year history of the canal, the sheer logistics involved in the carving out of its 1,115 miles, the number of workers dragooned into its construction (3,600,000 initially), its primary functions of shipping grain and luxury items such as silk north to the imperial capital, and so forth. D’Arcy-Brown delves into a lot of this, though sketchily; I never for instance learned anything about the technical side of the canal, how it was actually constructed or how a pound lock works (for lifting boats to higher elevations), which is actually what I most wanted to know. But enough interesting anecdotes and historical personages coloring the canal’s history are supplied to weave an entertaining tapestry of tales shifting seamlessly between the past and the present to carry me through the book. Continue reading →

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A little accident. A short story

Posted on March 27, 2013 by

Little accident

Liu Yan’s new Mazda 6 hadn’t a single dent on it in the year since she had bought it. Not bad for a novice negotiator of Beijing’s congested streets. She had taught herself how to parallel park without an attendant’s help, while her friends would drive out of their way to find easier parking. She was also careful each time she got out of the car, peeking out to make sure no one was coming who might sideswipe the door. She would even slowly open the door a little at first to alert any approaching riders.

But sometimes the greatest vigilance falls short, like this morning as she was getting out of the car in front of her workplace. Opening the door a crack as usual and seeing nothing coming, she grabbed her purse off the passenger seat and stepped out. In this brief elapse a man on a bicycle had somehow materialized and caught the edge of her door on his handlebar. He wasn’t going that fast – all the more odd, as how could she not have spotted him? – but it was enough to send his bike into a wobble that brought it almost to a standstill before he lost his balance and fell onto his knee. Continue reading →

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What you know, you know. A short story

Posted on February 28, 2013 by

What you know

Siran was showing how the seam on her antique Chinese shirt opened up for breastfeeding, and by the time she got through all the knotted buttons – they take as much dexterity to undo as to do up – my cellphone had rung twice. I was praying Debie would not call, but this was an unidentified number. They are usually telemarketers and I ignore them. Whenever it rings a second time it’s someone who knows me. It was her mother. Siran was not expecting this. “Oh no, tell her I’m not here!” she whispered, “I don’t want to talk to her.”

I had met her mother only the day before, having been invited over for dinner. The apartment was tidy and nicely decorated, with a calligraphy scroll on the wall and books, not baubles in the glass cabinet. Her mother was a good cook and trim and attractive for her fifty years, graceful, an unaffected poise. Her husband was stationed in another city for his job. I was almost becoming more interested in her than in her daughter. I gave her my card. Now I had her on the phone, and I don’t like to lie. “Yes, she’s here.” Continue reading →

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