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Aquila

Bedtime texts – short fiction by Kevin McGeary

 

Fantasising about Minnie was the best way to ignore his sister’s snoring. On the top bunk, where he could still smell shoes and discarded instant noodle packets, he saw Minnie the way she appeared last week on Lianhua, a breeze blowing black hair over her eyes.

It was there, under the watchful statue of Deng Xiaoping, that everything had gone wrong. His imagination wasn’t strong enough to alter what had happened. He saw himself whip out his English grammar textbook and three pages of hardcore Japanese porn fall on the grass. Minnie gave that absent gap-toothed smile that appeared to have nothing to do with happiness or amusement. The magazines weren’t his; they were courtesy of his prankster roommate, the spotty police chief’s son who went by the name of Angelababy.

As he felt the train slow down, sliding into another dark town, he focused on Minnie’s buttock cleavage and the way it rose above her dropped waist jeans.

“I need to borrow your phone,” his Sister Yezi called from below after being woken by the alighting passengers. He wiped the phone on his blanket before handing it down.

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Brother Guang

A house of cards – fiction by Hannah Lincoln

 

Ed: Friend of the Anthill Hannah Lincoln has published a collection of short stories from Beijing, Ashen, with gorgeous illustrations by Amy Sands. We're proud to present one of the stories from the collection

 

When the kang-kang man came by they were playing cards on a plastic table in the hutong.

The kang-kang man was the only grown-up on the lane who never smiled at Du Er. He only took the cans and paper and Ma ran after him to give the bottles from the customers last night with the big bellies. Du Er pinched a scrap of paper off the ground and ran after him too. “Uncle, I have paper!” he looked down and did not smile, just kept clanking kang-kang. Du Er bumbled back to her Ma and announced, “Look, paper!” but she was counting her coins and didn’t see.

Brother Guang hadn’t moved from his stool next to the table with the cards on it.

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Great Expectations

The literary dream of Beijing – by Lu-Hai Liang

 

When you're young and ambitious, keen on literary adventure, the idea of moving to a new country and becoming a writer is hugely romantic. You may not be the next Hemingway or Graham Greene, but the ghosts of those greats – men who drank, chased women and saw their art as their masculine fixation – leave long seductive shadows.

Beijing is not London or Tokyo, Tangier or Rome. It doesn't have the transparent allure of LA or the colourful chaos of Mexico City. And it sure as hell ain't Paris. It doesn't look beautiful in the rain and the architecture lacks all grace and subtlety. Beijing is unrelenting in its grayness, and filled with poor decisions about infrastructure and basic city planning. It’s a city so mired in reality that any charm pours straight into its drains, which are too few and badly designed. Yet journalists and writers have flocked here. Why?

I was born in the southern city of Guilin in 1989. Before I was born, but after I was conceived, my father swam from China to Hong Kong. Well, almost swam there. He didn't quite make it. He was picked up by Hong Kong water police after nine hours in the water, trying to reach the fabled British colony. If you want to read more about this family history, you can find it here. Suffice to say politics was involved in his decision to escape China. I moved to England, and met my father for the first time when I was five. At the age of twenty three, I reversed his journey and moved from Britain back to China.

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Escape

Trailing visions – a short story by Dipika Mukherjee

 

The smell of the manuscripts hits her nose like a memory. Like the scent of mashed wet earth on a child’s palm after a spell of rain.

Tess shivers slightly. It is cold inside, although she can see the harsh glare of the July sun through the cracks in the old wooden door. The books lie in neatly labeled rows, the tiny words sheeted in white paper under glass cases, as structured as a cemetery. The ones 400 years or older are under special lights.

In this room there is nothing but books and old furniture. Yet Tess feels, more than sees, green. Grass under gently falling rain, and a jade bangle glistening on the slender arm outstretched to catch a drop. She has to close her eyes until the vision disappears. When she forces herself to reopen her eyes, she sees rosewood chairs inlaid with marble and heavy low tables. She glances up at the heavy wooden beams on the ceiling, her eyes drop to cement floors. She breathes her relief.

Life in China, as a trailing spouse, is driving Tess mad.

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Ikea Love Song

Build your own utopia – by Alex Taggart

 

Ikea. A winning combination of minimalist Swedish design and affordable bourgeois domesticity, all folded up into a flatpack box of soft power and served with a side of meatballs. Anywhere in the world where people want something sustainable to sit on, the frictionless Ikea experience can be perfectly replicated – although never imitated – with no risk of compromising the company’s squeaky-clean Scando-socialist ideals. Or so I thought, until my first trip to the Beijing flagship store, one of the largest in the world.

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