My grandfather and his generation – nonfiction by Karoline Kan

My grandfather was already an old man when I came into the world, in a small county town near Tianjin. He was bald; he had to hold the radio very close to his ears when he listened to Peking Opera; he wore a pair of glasses when he read the newspaper and often stopped after reading a few lines, complaining that “the simplified characters lose both the meaning and the beauty of the language.”

The only property my grandpa owned was a countryside house near a river. In the summer, soft wind blew into the house and the ladybugs lay on the brown wooden windowsill. Through the window you could see trees with blossoming flowers, dragon flies resting on wide grass leaves, and across a river the rice field was a waving green sea. Grandpa would narrow his eyes, point his fingers to the field and say to me, “look, that land used to be ours. A long time ago, before your mother was born, even before the PLA liberated this place.”

“You’re lying,” I told him, standing on a chair to catch the ladybugs so I could put them on grandpa’s white beard. “Then why aren’t you rich anymore?”

Grandpa laughed. “Sometimes being poor is luckier than being rich. You’re too young to understand.”

Touring a Chinese Cultural Revolution museum – by Jesse Field

Lack of planning, pure and simple, left me with a day-long layover in Shantou, a city in northeastern Guangdong province which is home to China’s only museum devoted to the Cultural Revolution.

There’s something creepy about setting out in pursuit of trauma tourism. Tripadvisor’s top picks for attractions in Shantou include parks, a Teochew mansion, and a ferry ride out to Nan’ao Island for beach vistas and seafood. Why should a newcomer in town for only one day skip these fine locales to see old pictures of Chinese society tearing itself apart? Chinese nationals are justifiably frustrated when foreigners take a one-sided interest in China’s mistakes. The truth about the history of nations and peoples requires multiple contexts.

The trip to the museum is awkward and somewhat difficult, even if you speak Chinese.

Men of metal – short fiction by Kaiser Kuo

Ed: This story was read out at the Anthill Scotch & Stories night, accompanied by the Ardbeg 10

The place: Beijing’s notorious Get Lively club, where it’s Metal Moshpit Monday and the heads, they are a-banging. The band: Daomuren Gonghui, the locally-legendary Grave Robbers Guild, voted Beijing’s Most Morose Band by SinoMetal magazine three years running. They’re harder, louder, faster and far scarier than any band should reasonably be – even one that plays “Dess Maitou,” as they call their genre.

They stalk the stage, menacing and murderous, each clad in a black tee emblazoned with the undecipherable thorn-font logo of another Dess Maitou or Hei Maitou band. They’re painted up to look like they’ve just been exhumed from month-old mass graves, as though what flesh remains on their gaunt faces and gangly arms might slough right off. Fortunately, it doesn’t.

The relentless blast-beats the drummer kicks out slam into you like a jackhammer shoved up against your sternum.

Tragedy on the Yangtze – a reporter’s vignette by Mia Li

I first saw the woman on the dock by the muddy banks of the Yangtze, while droves of soldiers in camo ran to and fro from the supply barge. I was in a huddle of reporters and TV crews, covering the capsized cruise ship along with the rest of China’s media, foreign and domestic. She stood to one side, out of everyone’s way. She was tall, wearing dark blue rain boots, denim shorts, a black t-shirt and small cross-body bag, her long black hair blowing in the wind. Her hands clutched the handle of a purple umbrella. At first I thought she was a fellow reporter, until I noticed how still she was standing, like a wooden stick planted in the dirt. Her gaze was fixed far away on the foggy river, oblivious to all the soldiers, journalists and government officials shuffling around her. My heart sank as I realised why she must be there.

Soon after, everyone was herded behind a high wire fence three metres back from the river bank. She stood so close to the fence her face was pressed against it. Her eyes were red, and she held a ball of wet paper tissue in one hand. She looked very young. 22? Maybe 19?

An unexpected friendship – fiction by Daniel Tam-Claiborne

He met her over the classifieds; that was how it started. He was living in Beijing for a couple of years then, teaching, and porting in and out of Mongolia on a tourist visa. Truth be told, though, even the teaching was a stretch. He rented a small room in an apartment with a couple of other foreigners and was going out nearly every night. By the time Thursday arrived, he could practically count the stiches at the bottom of his wallet.

The woman in the ad wanted English lessons. It all sounded pretty standard: reading, listening, conversation practice. That is, except for the asking price. It was over twice what he had seen anywhere else, so naturally he contacted her immediately. He figured he would have to fight off scores of would-be English tutors, but she wrote back within the hour and agreed to start right away.

Class was Saturday mornings. Friday nights were always the worst, but he told himself that he’d just ease up gradually and it wouldn’t be so bad. There he was, drinking a glass of scotch, watching the traffic swirl outside his twelfth-story balcony, and before he knew it, he was waking up in a bed he didn’t recognize, pulling all his strength together just to get across town.