Kevin Fitzpatrick contributes an extract from a novel in progress, Yellow Fever; Foreign Moons that contains some nice encapsulations of Taiwan: "Hsinchu sucked. It was a place of Hakka thrift and where wealthy IT engineers shaved pennies, a town where money was made, not spent ... Smiles were just dodges here; people battened down life's hatches in the face of the ceaseless wind."
Elsewhere, there are two stories about Taiwan after an imagined Chinese takeover. First is Daniel C. Luthi's Taiwan Province, China set in 2010 and offering a very grim vision -- no KTVs, Internet cafes or discos, long-distance "People's buses" with bare plastic seats and open windows, houses a third of the value they had been in 2004, and close to a million former pro-democracy enthusiasts exiled to Tibet and Xinjiang where they could observe and appreciate the newly-found prosperity and happiness brought by integration into Greater China.
Don Silver offers a similar dystopia, also centered on Taichung, while Kurt Cline contributes The Reliquary, an ironic, hallucinatory non-ghost story which is one of the best things in this issue.
I don't feel qualified to judge the many black-and-white photos and drawings, but the seven named poets represented deserve attention (there's one anonymous poem, appropriately titled Unnamed). Tara Harold and Lindsay Alderton seem to me the strongest of these poets, but there are no weak items, further testimony to the high standard of contributions the magazine has to choose from these days.
The great thing about Pressed is that it establishes what I once doubted, that there is a foreign community in Taiwan that enjoys writing -- both doing it and, presumably, reading it.
The deadline for contributions to Pressed 4 is Jan. 15. One thing you can be sure of is that if you're published there you'll be in good company. Contact them on pressed@asia.com.
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