Who's Speaking Please?
Zhongwei had been in a daze ever since he came back home. There was still a dent in the centre of the pillow. The covers had been twisted by the snake-like grip of their legs. One flip-flop was in the...
View ArticleThe Road to the Weeping Spring
There was a time when the Osman Path was the only road to the weeping spring. Osman Batyr was the famous bandit chief of Altay a century ago. He was known as the “Kazakh King”. Up until then, all roads...
View ArticleJanuary: Bridges
The crimson mothers live in a crimson sea. We, island-like, still live on the city’s island. In January’s cold blast, we lean out of our windows. Quarter past three in the afternoon, and everyone in...
View ArticleBinary
This is how it works: 0 moves to 1, and 1 moves back to 0. An endless cycle. 0.In April I returned to the town of B, to Mountain Lake Road. Before coming back, I’d been living in the middle of a dank...
View ArticleMister Lover
While Gao Zong lived, the four seas were calm, the empire knew peace and prosperity, and all the world’s goods flowed towards its capital. Chang’an was, at the time, the most glorious city on earth....
View ArticleThe Death of Zernik
I am going to tell of a man slain in a duel, and the name of the man was Zernik. There was something absurd about the circumstances leading to the duel. One cold winter’s night, Zernik emerged from a...
View ArticleRegurgitated
The collective desire of City 64: To exit from the entrance.The news that a son had been eaten came at three thirty-three in the afternoon. At first the news was no more than a current of air brushing...
View ArticleMissing
Ten o’clock in the morning, thick grey smog. I’d been to buy some crabs at the Baliqiao wholesale market, and on my way back checked the mailbox at the entrance to our apartment complex. I’d already...
View ArticleA Woman, at Forty
Today was Luosi’s fortieth birthday. The alarm went off at 7 o’clock exactly. Luosi lay in bed a while, before getting up. Her legs felt heavy. Sitting on the side of the bed, her eyes shut, she swung...
View ArticleSissy Zhong
For the Zhongs of South Gate to have a son like Sissy seemed like a huge joke, at least to the folks of Pingle Town. ‘Sissy’ was just one of their disparaging nicknames for a man who was spineless, or...
View Article1966: Locomotive
This is a story about a lonely little boy. It is 1966, and he is eight years old. It’s autumn, and the boy is walking along the railroad tracks on the thick black railroad ties. He’s lonely and...
View ArticlePainless
Nobody in the village noticed that my brother’s six-year-old daughter had chewed off all her fingers. Only her little palms were left, like two tiny shovels. But more mobile and fleshier, with a...
View ArticleKeep Running, Little Brother
My little brother, Wu Shuangfeng, was born in 1984. The day he was born, Dad was doing overtime at the factory. Nan and Granddad were at home playing mahjong. The baby had shown up on the ultrasound as...
View ArticleBone Down
In forty days and nights a TV antenna can go up like a rack of fish bones choking the throat of the highway and hills it's slender, lethal—horizontal in a city that grows vertically Are you going to...
View ArticleCrows
In China, the crow has always had rather a bad reputation. It’s a sinister bird, a harbinger of misfortune. In Chinese films it’s always there in the bleak wilderness, or the shadow-strewn graveyard,...
View ArticleThere is Nothing to Bind Our Hearts Together
Their dreams were growing shorter and shorter. Some mysterious force had caused their dream worlds to collide one twilit evening. They dreamed themselves a white house with a blue-tiled roof, washed...
View ArticleWho's Speaking Please?
Zhongwei had been in a daze ever since he came back home. There was still a dent in the centre of the pillow. The covers had been twisted by the snake-like grip of their legs. One flip-flop was in the...
View ArticleThe Road to the Weeping Spring
There was a time when the Osman Path was the only road to the weeping spring. Osman Batyr was the famous "King of Altay” of a century ago. Up until then, all roads had stretched far around the edges of...
View ArticleJanuary: Bridges
The crimson mothers live in a crimson sea. We, island-like, still live on the city’s island. In January’s cold blast, we lean out of our windows. Quarter past three in the afternoon, and everyone in...
View ArticleBinary
This is how it works: 0 moves to 1, and 1 moves back to 0. An endless cycle. 0.In April I returned to the town of B, to Mountain Lake Road. Before coming back, I’d been living in the middle of a dank...
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