Coming to terms with 1989 as a young Chinese – by Catherine Wang

For a long time, the only significance 1989 held for me was that it was the year when I was born, in the coastal city of Tianjin. By the time I went to university, I had heard about the other thing that happened that same spring. The term used for it when I grew up was not “June 4th”, let alone “Tiananmen square massacre”, but more simply “the student riot”.

“When did our youngest son get married again?” my grandfather would ask my grandmother, when he was flicking through the family photo album.

“The year of the student riot,” grandmother would reply, as if it was just another incident to mark the passage of time.

As a child, I didn’t take it too seriously either.

An ostrich on the loose in Shijiazhuang – fiction by Tom Pellman

Ed: This story was read out at Scotch & Stories night at the Beijing Bookworm, accompanied by a tasty Glenfiddich 12. We'll be drip feeding the stories onto the site over the coming weeks

The tiger suit stinks. It smells like dried sweat and grass clippings. They make me wear it when we practice catching escaped animals at the Shijiazhuang zoo. The last time, two weeks ago, they chased me for almost twenty minutes straight, waving their snares, until I fell into some bushes. I tore a small hole in the leg and now I have to remember to stay on Director Wang’s right side so he doesn’t see it. He says rules are rules. If the suit gets ruined when I’m wearing it, I have to pay for it. That’s a rule. Another one is: last person who joined the team wears the suit.

Poetry for along the way – by Susie Gordon

THIS POEM FIRST APPEARED IN UNITED VERSES

Over plains and hills we came

for miles. Miles and months we trod west

in a camel train, carrying silks and furs,

jade and ivory, wood and metal

from Chang’an. Turkan, Altai, Tashkent, Palmyre:

miles of tundra, desert, forest, lush brown foothills -

obsidian sky;

each night a caravanserai.

In Damasc by the mosque my father heard it said

there was a lodging ten miles out of town

with a bath-house tiled in topaz, day beds thrown with fleeces,

and a poet who spoke and sang of truths, of secrets.

A Chinese American rediscovers TCM in Beijing – by William Poy Lee

When she escaped China by marriage in 1949 and settled in San Francisco, my mother made eight promises to my grandmother. The seventh promise was to cook the traditional qi soups for her family to protect their mind-body balance and inner energy.

Along with every other American in the 1950s, my brother and I ate Campbell’s most popular soups – chicken noodle, cream of tomato, mushroom, split-pea. But at home, we also gulped down smelly, weird tasting Chinese soups – cow brain with ginseng, turtle, ox tail, four herbs chicken (from a live chicken, throat slit and defeathered in Chinatown). 

As we ate, Mom explained the rationale to us in ways that made no sense at the time.

A prophesy comes true in Shanghai – fiction by Tom Mangione

When I first came to Shanghai, I was a young man with a full head of hair and a bare chin. I could grow a beard, but I always thought it a bit gauche. Back home, everyone was growing beards, but the trend was lost on me. Clean-shaven felt classic, and I was a classic kind of guy. Maybe I was more classic than I knew.

I spent my first weekend in town at some local bars that I'd heard were cool. Everything about me gave away the fact that I was new to Shanghai, new to China, new to all of it. I fumbled with the novel currency, studying Mao’s smirk each time I pulled out my wallet. I tried out my nascent Chinese – wo yao yi ge pijiu – only to have the bartenders answer in calm, steady English. I was the proverbial deer in the headlights, and Shanghai was the Mack truck ready to splatter my assumptions all over the pavement. 

At the bar, I took up conversation with a middle-aged, white American guy, sitting sad and alone. He was bald, bearded and quite skinny. He looked like he had no one to talk to, and I felt sorry for him. I don't remember anything we talked about except for one thing. He said that every white man who stays in China long enough becomes bearded, bald or both. Usually both. When he said this I assumed that this was just his way of coddling his fragile middle-aged ego. He was, well, bald and bearded himself. It wasn’t until later that I realized I was wrong. Deer-in-the-headlights-meets-Mack-truck wrong. A chin full of prickly pear stubble is fate. A shiny bowling ball of a pate is destiny.