This is a collection of weird and whimsical short stories, mostly set in the US and China. The author was born in Boston but brought up in Chongqing during WWII.
When you begin to read this book, the nature of the stories is hard to determine. Are they satires, comedies, or just written in some acutely personal vein, you ask yourself. It's hard to get onto their wavelength, and you can't help wondering whether the fault lies with you or with the stories themselves.
Gradually the mist thins, however, and as it does so Alex Kuo's wry smile begins to appear in pale Chinese sunlight. Even so, it never achieves total definition. Having finished the book, I'm still not sure that I have the measure of his style.
But perhaps that's his technique -- however much you think you understand him, and hence are able to predict what's coming, he always has another trick up his sleeve with which to catch you unawares.
Take the story called Digging from China. A researcher trying to perfect a new species of tea, one that will grow well further north than China's traditional tea-growing areas, is in his laboratory attempting to clone tea seeds. Before going home for the night he slices one seed fragment in two, thinking that the livelihoods of the 2,831 people involved in tea production in the area depend on the movement of his scalpel. When he gets home he finds a parcel from a friend in Boston with a trowel inside. With this he goes out into his garden and starts to dig, ending up at the end of the story (which is only three pages long) in Buenos Aires.
What is bizarre about this is not so much the digging through the middle of the earth (an old fantasy) but how this connects with the first half of the story with its exact number of tea-growers and the precision of the researcher's scalpel cut. What kind of fiction, in other words, is Alex Kuo writing?
There are many more stories like this. A woman is hanging by her fingertips from the 13th floor of an inner-city building. The narrator goes up and asks her if she'll come in if he reads her a story. Only if he changes place with her, she replies.
"Quirkiness" has to be the word to describe what characterizes these tales. They are halfway between Jorge Luis Borges and Garrison Keillor. They have Borges' surreal fantasy, and they also have Keillor's domestic quaintness and subdued humor. Neither would be especially remarkable in itself. It's the combination that's so unsettling.
Most of the stories are very short. The longest, The Catholic All-Star Chess Team, imagines a chess tournament in Hong Kong in the early 1950s. The colony's governor had issued a challenge, with HK$4,000 as prize money, and the senior boys and girls of the leading Catholic schools get together to field a team. The event takes place across a long weekend in the prestigious Peninsula Hotel, with Billy Graham among the spectators, in the colony to launch a mission.
The story proceeds in conventional, realistic fashion, so much so that in one sentence the vessels of the "Star Ferry" that links Hong Kong Island and Kowloon are listed by name. "So on that early June Saturday and Monday while the Day Star, North Star, Shining Star, Morning Star, Meridian Star, Celestial Star, Southern Star, Evening Star, Twinkling Star and Leading Star sailed across the harbor two hundred and eighty-six times, chess history was made."
The unexpected erupts, needless to say. Billy Graham is ejected for whistling Onward Christian Soldiers after a complaint is lodged by a player, and one of the Catholic schoolgirls, having revealed an imminent checkmate in a brilliant move, levitates up to the ceiling.
Several of these stories deal with political subjects, in particular the unexplained disappearance of dissidents. In these stories Kuo's taste for the bizarre and the illogical comes into its own. In such circumstances, what happens contrasts strongly with what can be said. John le Carre and other writers of Cold War spy thrillers have demonstrated how life under police states is a labyrinth of mirrors. Appearances deceive, and disappearances can't be talked about. This is precisely the world reflected in Alex Kuo's political stories. His humor, usually so tight-lipped and tersely-stated, here becomes ironic and bitter indeed.
In one of them, Definitions, a Beijing TV news anchorman displays a flicker of emotion when reporting the student gatherings of May 1989. He's later visited at his home by a tall figure in a long coat who hands him a document defining the "new definitive dogma" on disappearances. Transmitters of information are "forbidden to convey stories about disappearances, ever. They're demoralizing; they can panic the people and destabilize the government. Besides, it's not true; it's not scientific, people don't just disappear."
The story ends with the narrator looking out at a blank space. All Beijing has disappeared, and the only thing he is confronted with is an image of his own double. This is classic political surrealism. It could come from Kafka, or from almost any Eastern European writer from the communist era.
In the title story, some Chinese students studying in the US are discussing a forthcoming demonstration in favor of democracy in China. The group contains "half of Beijing's leaders' children all gathered in one room in America." They go to apply for a permit, and there remember that, as the demonstration's leaders, they have to buy face powder and lipstick so as to look their best in front of the TV cameras.
The narrator remembers Beijing 10 years previously and remarks: "We did it wrong back then, and we're doing it wrong again on this side of the Pacific. It's now beginning to be doubtful that we're ever going to survive the messiness of this part of our history."
Published in Hong Kong by Asia 2000, this is a collection which, though no masterpiece, improves markedly the more you read and think about it.
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
Australia’s ABC last week published a piece on the recall campaign. The article emphasized the divisions in Taiwanese society and blamed the recall for worsening them. It quotes a supporter of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) as saying “I’m 43 years old, born and raised here, and I’ve never seen the country this divided in my entire life.” Apparently, as an adult, she slept through the post-election violence in 2000 and 2004 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the veiled coup threats by the military when Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) became president, the 2006 Red Shirt protests against him ginned up by
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
Among Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) villages, a certain rivalry exists between Arunothai, the largest of these villages, and Mae Salong, which is currently the most prosperous. Historically, the rivalry stems from a split in KMT military factions in the early 1960s, which divided command and opium territories after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cut off open support in 1961 due to international pressure (see part two, “The KMT opium lords of the Golden Triangle,” on May 20). But today this rivalry manifests as a different kind of split, with Arunothai leading a pro-China faction and Mae Salong staunchly aligned to Taiwan.
RSS