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The Ninth Man

A short story from Tibet by Pema Tseden, translated by Cao Zhen

 

Before meeting the man, Yongcuo had lost her confidence in all men.

This man was her ninth man.

Yongcuo’s first man was a monk. She was 18 years old then. Without knowing how it began, she and the first man had just had a crush on each other. Yongcuo was a beauty in the village, wooed by throngs of young men. Since she hooked up with the monk, folks in the village felt confused, saying things in the world happened without a reason.

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The View

Flash fiction from Shanghai by Josh Stenberg

 

Jason called out of the blue. He was staying at a fancy hotel in Pudong; I should come over. The view was amazing, he said. Had I ever been? So, come.

I was startled and almost stumbled in the street. I agreed instinctively, out of confusion. Once I put down the phone, a prick of self-loathing. I wasn’t going anywhere special, so I bought a pair of new shoes in self-parody. Leather is also a kind of substance abuse.

Despite the shoes, the day was suddenly empty and smelled perilous. There was too much time before I was to go meet him and I knew that at home I would only mull and stew. So I just kept walking. The streets were cradled in that brief spring when the temperature is still comfortable but the threat of summer has already made the rounds. Things begin to sweat, especially things like us, who don’t belong, who prickle and rash. The climate is trying to excrete us.

This thought proved I hadn’t slept enough, so I repressed the desire for a cigarette and groped about in my mind for some duty or escape. I followed a sign, as if it held some kind of authority, like it might fulfil a perverse need to foil expectation. I turned into the Sun Yatsen residence.

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300

 

We all know the legend of the 300 Spartan stories who fended off the godking Xerxes of Bad Prose. Clad in clean grammatical sandals and minimal adjectival leather, armed with the sharp blades of apt metaphor, they stymied the advance of the slave empire of RSS, and died martyrs to narrative in a news-obsessed world. And they had sexy abvs.

So forget 70 years after the defeat of Japan, even if in Beijing we're loving the blue skies fabricated for the occasion. Today we're celebrating 300 posts on the Anthill, since we launched in China just shy of three years ago. (Other anniversaries include ten years in China for fiction editor Tom Pellman, and seven years to the day since I first moved to Beijing.)

Week after next there will be a military parade on Tiananmen square in honour of our achievement. But until then here are six brave warriors from among the 300, which you might have missed before. They and others will also be collected in our anthology book, coming out at the end of the year from Earnshaw Books and with a big bash at the Beijing bookworm.

Lots of good new stuff in the pipeline in the coming months, including nonfiction by David Moser, Jeremiah Jenne, Jonathan Kos-Read and RFH, plus photography, fiction, poetry and translation. Sign up to the weekly email digest to not miss a beat, and share our Twitter and Facebook. Thanks for reading us! - Alec

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Poem: Names

A sense of where you belong – by Yuan Yang

 

When I was four and went to school

in Manchester, the kids would ask:

“What’s your name? Where you from?”

and I would say, “Ni shuo shen me?”

Which is Mandarin for the kind

of bewilderment you have as a kid

from inner-mountain-basin China

who has just come through Heathrow.

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Youth!

A photo essay by Yang Zhazha

 

Ed: We're delighted to present a selection of photography by Yang Zhazha, from his series "Youth!". Zhazha is post 80s artistic youth sort himself (fond of tweed flat caps), a talented street photographer, and a personal friend. We'll follow up with another photo essay from him in the autumn, but for now we think these images from a Chinese childhood speak louder than words.

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