Kartika_Issue15

Cover Art: “The Home Front" from the Volition Era Series 2011 

By Jordan Josafat 

© March, 2013 by Kartika Review 

Kartika Review publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction that endeavor to expand and 

enhance the mainstream perception of Asian American creative writing. The journal 

also publishes book reviews, literary criticism, author interviews, and artwork, 

turning its focus on works relevant to the Asian Diaspora or authored by individuals 

of Asian descent. 

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ADVISORY BOARD 

Elmaz Abinader 

Justin Chin 

Peter Ho Davies 

Randa Jarrar 

Gish Jen 

Elaine H. Kim 

Maxine Hong Kingston 

Gus Lee 

Li-Young Lee 

Min Jin Lee 

Ed Lin 

Nami Mun 

Fae Myenne Ng 

Lac Su 

Bryan Thao Worra 

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR 

Vinay Patel 

PROGRAM COORDINATOR 

Jennifer Banta 

ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013 

3 

MASTHEAD 

MANAGING EDITOR 

Sunny Woan 

FICTION EDITOR 

Christine Lee Zilka 

POETRY EDITOR 

Eugenia Leigh 

NONFICTION EDITOR 

Jennifer Derilo 

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR 

Paul Lai 

Kartika Review is a proud member of the 

Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

MISSION STATEMENT 

Kartika Review serves the Asian American community 

and those involved with Diasporic Asian-inspired 

literature. We scout for compelling Asian American 

creative writing and artwork to present to the public at 

large. Our editors actively solicit contributions from 

established virtuosos in our community in hopes their 

works here will inspire the next generation of virtuosos. 

We also showcase emerging writers and artists we 

foresee to be the future powerhouses of their craft. 

Ultimately, Kartika strives to create a literary forum 

that caters to and celebrates the wordsmiths of the 

Asian Diaspora. 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Editorial Eugenia Leigh 6 

FICTION 

A Shadowed Season Sharon Hashimoto 11 

Skin Deep Anu Kandikuppa 20 

Heartbreak Wah-Ming Chang 29 

Thoughts of Sinking Kaitlin Solimine 32 

FEATURED ARTIST 

Jordan Josafat 49 

POETRY 

Nu Ren Xin Hai Di Zhen: A Woman’s Heart is a 

Needle at the Bottom of the SEa 

5 

Karen An-hwei Lee 

Parousia I 56 

Portrait of Anonymity Henry W. Leung 57 

Quarantine 58 

Tree Risings Purvi Shah 59 

NONFICTION 

The Transfusion of Yukiyo Kanahashi Jackson Bliss 60 

Club Gigolo Sean Labrador y Manzano 71 

AUTHOR INTERVIEW 

Monique Truong 

Christine Lee Zilka and 

Sunny Woan 

Contributor Bios 80 

Editor Bios 83 

55 

74

EDITORIAL 

Eugenia Leigh 

Dear Readers, 

After I read the heart-wrenching pieces in this fifteenth issue of Kartika 

Review, I was numb with gratitude. So here I am, debuting as the magazine’s 

new Poetry Editor, babbling before you and humbled to be part of such a 

necessary venture. Let me explain what I mean. 

Last September, a Minneapolis paper reported that Japanese American writer 

David Mura once gave Junot Díaz this advice: 

"Sometimes you've got to become the person you need to become before 

writing the book you want to write. The desire and the talent are not always 

enough, sometimes you have to change as a human being." 

My brain lacks the mechanism that separates the creator from his or her 

creation. I was the kid who—about halfway through reading a book—flipped 

to the back to find the author’s bio. I wanted to know who it was that told the 

story. Why that person chose to tell this story as opposed to thousands of 

others. Why that person cared whether I listened or walked away. 

I read every story and poem in this issue with David Mura’s words in mind. 

How did these authors have to change and who did they have to become 

before they could write these pieces? I imagined them in solitude for hours, 

mulling over diction, toying with line breaks, stomping all over standard 

syntactic formulas. These writers are scientists. They’re researchers of 

human lives. They observe the slightest nuances of the heart, experiment 

with language and report their findings in the most elegant ways. 

When I finished, I discovered a remarkable thread throughout this issue: 

each author delivered his or her story with staunch dedication to emotional 

truth. 

The fiction section gives us four distinctly different voices. Sharon 

Hashimoto’s “A Shadowed Season” delves into the internal dialogue of a 

great-grandmother, Etsuko, stuck in a nursing home. Even while telling 

Etsuko’s story in the third person, Hashimoto possesses the startling ability 

to burrow into the deepest crevices of Etsuko’s memories and regrets, and 

unveil the unsettling melancholy of the elderly. 

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The other three fiction pieces are told in the first person, but explore their 

characters’ struggles in vastly different ways. Kaitlin Solimine’s “Thoughts 

of Sinking” is told in the voice of Lao Chen, the husband to a woman reeling 

from chemotherapy’s aftermath. As we follow the couple through their 

daughter’s diving meet, Solimine uses Lao Chen to extrapolate on the largest 

life questions: “What is life for? Why love? Why die?” She peppers her story 

with a number of quotes, my favorite belonging to poet Han Shan, who said, 

“Tell families with silverware and cars: what’s the use of all that noise and 

money?” Solimine’s story, an excerpt from a novel, is the longest fiction 

read, but embodies the wisdom of someone who had to become a certain, 

tried adult before she could confront such giant themes. 

Wah-Ming Chang’s “Heartbreak” explores the healing process of the 

narrator accepting the suicide of Leslie Cheung, an actor. The short piece 

conveys this jarring emotional journey by refusing to reveal. It is distilled, 

keeps the worst emotions at bay and requires the presence of a third 

character—a stranger who remains anonymous as “the waiter”—for the 

narrator to process the suicide. Chang’s carefully crafted portrait gifts us 

with a uniquely reserved narrator, unwilling to break down while clearly 

being desperate for closure. 

Anu Kandikuppa makes a brilliant choice in “Skin Deep” by using a series 

of letters to introduce us to the obsessive nature of an Indian mother, Manju 

Nohria, who remains blinded to her own prejudice regarding skin color. 

Although Nohria spirals into an almost desperate caricature of a woman with 

deep-seated racist ideas, Kandikuppa expertly reports Manju Nohria’s 

insecurities and issues without providing a solution or didactic moral or the 

author’s own opinions. She remains true to Nohria’s sentiments. 

I selected five poems by three poets for the poetry section because I admired 

their ability to make confident declarations in emotionally vulnerable ways. 

All five poems require the poets to have walked through certain fires before 

arriving at this place of honest reflection. 

Henry Leung’s “Portrait of Anonymity” and “Quarantine” are two poems 

with wildly different subject matters—post-heartbreak and post-apocalypse, 

respectively—but share a similar sobriety and gorgeous lyricism in their 

approach to the aftermath of dark times. The soul-shifting lines I am clinging 

to this season come from “Quarantine”: “Mountains heave up; I can walk / 

over anything if I don’t stop.” As the poetry editor, I am honored to give you 

these poems in the heart of winter. To show you, as much as I need to show 

myself, what is possible even when “pain travels through me / at three 

hundred feet per second.” 

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Purvi Shah’s “Tree Risings” directly reflects David Mura’s sentiment that 

certain writings require the wisdom of growth and even age. The speaker in 

this poem, “nearer to forty,” observes and speaks to a four-year-old child, 

but possesses the open, teachable heart to be able to extract metaphor and 

life lessons from this seemingly minor interaction. Here, it isn’t the poet who 

tells us how to live. It is the poet who shares what this child has taught her: 

“which branch is stable, which foot leads, which foot / clasps.” 

Karen An-hwei Lee’s first poem, “Nuren Xin Haidi Zhen: A Woman’s Heart 

Is a Needle at the Bottom of the Sea,” hones into the world’s “crevasse,” that 

icy place “far below the earth” where we humans store our pain. Lee 

highlights “a girl [who] crawls inside her own grief,” and explores the girl’s 

suffering by asking a series of questions, but never offering the author’s 

answers. Instead, Lee ends the poem by allowing the girl—the owner of that 

suffering—to speak. Lee’s second poem, “Parousia I,” takes a prophetic tone 

in which she escapes the crevasse and postulates on the state of “nations” 

and even the “universe.” Although confident, Lee’s tone magically keeps 

from being didactic—especially with a polite request to share what she 

“sees”—and ends with a gentle imperative for the world. 

The two non-fiction pieces in this issue blew me away with their boldness. 

They both use experimental structural vehicles to tell their stories and both 

spotlight uncomfortable truths about humanity. 

Sean Labrador y Manzano’s “Club Gigolo” strikes us with two bulky, 

paragraphs filled with stream-of-consciousness, and begins with the 

exchange of a mint between the mouths of two cousins. Labrador y Manzano 

throws us into a crowd of details whirling through Olongapo, Philippines. 

Our eyes dart with the narrator’s and our minds jump from body parts to 

memories to questions to sounds along with the narrator’s mind. By the end 

of the story, Labrador y Manzano convinces us that this is the only way to 

show us how someone finds his long-lost cousin and stumbles upon her life 

as a sex worker. 

Jackson Bliss’ “series of (im)perfect and flawed translations, a project of 

narrative multiplication” pieces together the disjointed memoir of his 

Japanese grandmother, Yukiyo Kanahashi. In “The Transfusion of Yukiyo 

Kanahashi,” Bliss epitomizes the David Mura quote when he admits, “It took 

most of my life to piece together her story, and even more time for the scraps 

to cohere, but one day I finally understood the truth about my sobo.” Bliss 

needed to become the man he became before being able to understand the 

pain and shame of his grandmother, a survivor of a series of crimes. Kartika 

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readers, we have the privilege of being the first audience to receive this 

masterful insight into trauma and dementia, told in twenty-two sections 

wrought with an unflinching honesty that comes only after years of 

deliberate (and likely excruciating) reflection and questioning. I read Bliss’ 

piece last. And when I came to the end of it, I found myself in tears. 

Many people have written about suicide. And cancer. And race and postapocalyptic 

worlds, for that matter. But something compelled each author in 

this issue of Kartika to challenge our understanding of some of humanity’s 

most complicated topics. Only some give us redemption, but they all come 

out baring the flesh of their characters and revealing what it means to be a 

human in a broken world. Not a single author lies to us. 

We also have the honor of featuring an interview with Monique Truong— 

author of The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth—who creates characters 

who live as outsiders in their stories but possess a beautiful humanity that 

Truong explores to connect them intimately to her readers. 

Issue 15 is a personal gift for me. I expected to “enjoy” being an editor, but I 

didn’t expect to be changed. I didn’t expect my first issue as poetry editor of 

Kartika would bless me with a newfound conviction—that today’s Asian 

American writers are working their asses off to pry open the mouths that 

have stayed silent for too long. They are the voices our ancestors—even 

some of our parents—never dared to long for. The voices that tell their truths 

and tell them naked. Without shame. And through such meticulous 

dedication to craft, we find healing and a new trajectory through which our 

collective narrative will be shared for generations. 

I thought I was signing on to be part of a magazine. Thank you, authors and 

readers, for showing me that I’m signing on to be part of a movement. 

Go relish this issue. And buy a copy for someone you love. See you at AWP! 

Cheers, 

Eugenia Leigh 

Poetry Editor 

9

The Home Front 

Jordan Josafat 

10

A SHADOWED SEASON 

Sharon Hashimoto 


Etsuko could still count, but she needed to keep track with her fingers. 

Sometimes she was distracted by the age spots and broken cuticles. Did it 

really matter if ninety-six came after ninety-eight? She’d been waiting so 

long for Masayuki’s return that the numbers didn’t really seem to matter. 

Mostly, it was just a way to pass the hours. Hard enough to know the day of 

the week and when to expect her daughter’s visit. 

Etsuko was losing her English words syllable by syllable. When she spoke, it 

was in choppy simple sentences. Bumbye, she counseled herself. Just wait. 

Once in a while she could trick herself into remembering. What was she 

supposed to do, what was she supposed to say to get somebody’s attention? 

The white people who ran around in brightly colored scrubs were so rushed 

and busy. They would stare at her, watching her lips, then wrinkle their own 

eyebrows. Last night, there’d been the nurse who just frowned, shook her 

head and walked away. I’ll count to one hundred to give them a chance, 

Etsuko reasoned. 

There was a time when she could sniff the air, feeling the hot sun on her 

shoulders and know that she would soon be harvesting the papayas and figs 

in the yard. At her house, mounded globes of lichee nuts would litter the 

ground. Such a small tree, but with so many limbs bending with the fruit. 

How Masayuki loved their sweet white flesh, piling high the shiny almondshaped 

seeds. How she warned the boy not to eat so much. All he knew was 

that lichee nuts tasted good on his tongue, cooling in all the hot Hawai’i sun. 

She shivered. In this air-conditioned place, her body was forgetting the shift 

of seasons, when her joints would ache and grind with the threat of rain. The 

mustachioed man in the navy suit on the TV news station always spoke in 

the same tone of voice even though there were pictures of plane crashes or 

yellow suns with the day’s expected high temperature. “Thank-you, may 

I…”—the polite terms she once used were slipping away. Mostly Etsuko 

grunted when the Nurse’s Aide asked if she needed to use the toilet. They 

always pinched her elbow when she struggled with her walker down the hall. 

This morning when she woke up, snapping her neck to one side, she had 

been surprised by the sight of her arms lying like two old branches against 

the white sheets. She wanted to pop the kink out of her shoulder from 

sleeping on a too-soft mattress. The Japanese block pillow that held the 

shape of her neck was gone. Instead she found herself in a high twin bed 

with a metal guard rail to keep her from falling out. She had to bite her lower 

11

lip as she tried to swing her swollen feet to the edge. All she succeeded in 

was tangling up the bed sheets. It served her right, she thought. Why had she 

decided to cut down the lichee tree? She distinctly remembered setting out 

the step stool, balancing her legs against the fourth step and swinging away 

at the top branches with a hatchet. Diseased and thin, the tree was only about 

six feet tall, maybe four inches in diameter. There had been a satisfied thump 

when the top had fallen to the ground, the twigs and dead leaves scattering in 

a circle around her. Etsuko knew enough to take the felling in stages. A little 

bit at a time, she told herself. 

But now she was bored with holding still and waiting for her breakfast. 

There was only so much sleeping an old lady could do. She didn’t recognize 

her roommate who seemed to have shriveled up into a fetal position and 

disappeared into a lump among the blankets. Etsuko wanted her green tea, 

rice with a raw egg broken on top, a little pickled takuwan on the side. She 

put her hand against her stomach, wondering when it would start growling. 

She made a face when her tray finally came. There was a bowl of brown 

oatmeal, a piece of dry toast, and some orange juice that came in a plastic 

container with a piece of foil over the top. “Gohan,” she said to the attendant, 

pointing a crooked finger at the bowl. “Ocha,” she repeated, raising the 

plastic cup. 

“Coffee?” the blond girl asked, the corners of her mouth pulling her smile 

into a frown. Her lipstick seemed to grow redder against the peach-like skin. 

Then the face brightened. “Tea? Would you like me to get you some tea?” 

Etsuko kissed her cup, nodding up and down. That was one word she 

remembered. The English word was tea. 

The blond girl seemed proud of herself when she brought back a little metal 

pot and a small square tea bag with a mailman’s face on it. “Lipton’s,” she 

said, raising and dunking the square into the hot water. 

At least she was trying to be kind, Etsuko thought to herself. That was more 

than her dull daughter could manage. After thirty years of marriage to that 

hakujin, what should she expect? 

The blond attendant sat with her a while, and Etsuko felt obligated to take a 

few spoonfuls of the gruel. The toast should have been darker, but it was 

okay. She ate slowly, waiting for the time when she could shove her cloth 

napkin into the bowl and hide what was left. 

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“Nurse Hopkins said your daughter will be coming in with your 

grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They’re going to help you celebrate 

your eighty-fifth birthday. You’re going to want to comb your hair. I’ll come 

back to help you later.” 

Etsuko chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. It didn’t matter what 

the attendant had said. She knew this was as good as breakfast would get. 

But even though the food didn’t taste good, at least it was something to do. 

The warmth of her cup soaked into her thin fingers. The steam smelled 

sharply of leaves. She was getting sleepy. Etsuko pointed her big right toe 

beneath the blanket, then felt the calf muscle tighten. Little needles danced 

up and down her leg as the circulation returned. It was usually her knees that 

wobbled, had made her take to using a stick to tap her way across the yard. 

She knew the pain couldn’t be fixed. There had been too many floors to be 

scrubbed, too many bills she had carried in her fisted hand as she bowed 

lower and lower before the merchants—promising to pay, giving what she 

could. Who had the money or the time? 

When you were poor, there were always so many things to do, promises to 

make to children. Someday, after we’ve saved a bit of money. Someday 

when you’ve grown up and have a good job, you can afford to go to a movie 

or maybe a Chinese restaurant. So many times when she had to bend over to 

pick up the little ones when they cried and reached out, swing them onto her 

hip. All of them had looked like fat sausages, their arms and legs ballooning 

up until they finally began to crawl. And she had been so skinny, so busy 

washing other people’s laundry in a big wooden tub. 

She had ti leaf plants at all four corners of their rented house—for health and 

good fortune. But they had grown up stunted or diseased with browned 

edges. Maybe she had used all her luck up in seven short years. Lucky in 

love, a good strong man who hadn’t minded that she was uneducated, 

without social standing. So lucky that he chose her over his own family. Her 

husband had had plans to buy land. They were saving money. And then, 

there had been the two babies who died. Finally, her husband. 

She lay and drowsed, her arms cradling herself as if she were cold. There 

was the funeral service, the casket carried by eight of the men who had seen 

the scaffolding start to crumble, who had shouted and scrambled to dig her 

husband loose of the rubble. But she hadn’t cried. There was too much to do, 

and all she wanted was a little rest. 

“Ka-san! O-ka-san!” The voices seemed to pull at Etsuko, just like they had 

at the funeral, their tiny hands pulling at her sleeves. 

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“Masayuki! Tsune, sit quietly. Behave yourselves.” She had wanted to add: 

“That is your father inside that box. What will people think?” She could have 

pinched their upper arms. But then she had to remind herself that they were 

children. There were only the two left now, the oldest girl, the youngest boy. 

She squinted and it took a while for her to fully open her eyes. Etsuko sighed, 

cracking her lids open a little at a time, slamming them shut, and then 

blinking them wider. There was Tsune, grown-up, her face tying up in hard 

knots. Her hands were gently tugging at Etsuko’s hospital sleeve. A brightly 

wrapped rectangle was propped up on her stomach. The bow was looped in 

intricate circles, a strange artificial blossom. Etsuko wanted to hold it close 

to her nose, sniff the perfume. The ribbon’s silver metallic glittered like 

sharp sparks in the room’s bright light. 

“Nani desu?” she asked. Her fingers turned the package around and around. 

Carefully she watched her daughter’s face. 

Tsune, the girl, had been born first. And in those first few weeks, everyone 

had thought she held the promise of becoming a beauty. Jet black hair, pale 

skin, oval face. Etsuko had been expecting so much. But babies change and 

by the time Tsune was fifteen, it seemed to Etsuko that her daughter’s skin 

was a dead white. Her eyes were too small and close together. Tsune was a 

hard worker, a dutiful child, but homely. 

“A birthday present, Ka-san. Something I thought you could wear for the 

party.” Tsune pulled the ribbon off. “Here, let me help.” 

Inside was a red polyester dress with a black belt. Tsune held it up by the 

shoulders, then lay it close to her mother’s chest. 

“Takai, ne?” 

“It’s a gift, Mama. You shouldn’t worry about money.” Her voice sounded 

exasperated. She straightened the cuffs on the long sleeves. “I think it’ll look 

very nice on you. Red is a good color.” 

Red, Etsuko thought to herself and shook her head. She would be 

embarrassed to wear that shade. It was too young for her now. She was long 

past her days of wearing bright colors. Tsune was always trying to buy 

things with her white husband’s money. Etsuko would have preferred her 

own black wool dress, the one she had stitched on a trundle sewing machine 

borrowed from the Minamotos. She had cut the material from a fine old 

14


kimono. Moth-eaten, the owners had said, and she had purchased it for a few 

dollars—liking how the fabric felt, how the black weave picked up sunlight. 

Always thin, the dress still fit. Etsuko had last worn it to her niece’s wedding 

with the simple one-pearl necklace her husband had given to her. She 

thought she had looked very fine. Would the boy, Masayuki, recognize her 

in red? 

There had been little blood when the eight-year-old had fallen. He had been 

shinnying high to reach the last fruits on a tall mango tree. Masayuki was 

always so hungry. Tsune had run up to Mrs. Littlejohn’s house and pounded 

on the door. Etsuko hadn’t felt any broken bones. Only a deep puncture 

wound on the side of the boy’s heel. She had made a paste of ground up 

potato bugs to help eat the bad flesh away. But Masayuki had grown fevered. 

More bad luck, Etsuko thought to herself. From that time on, it seemed like 

something was always a burning inside, behind her son’s young eyes. 

And then Tsune was pulling the dress over her head, and she was sputtering 

and flailing as her hands searched for an opening. “I’ve only the one chance, 

Ma,” a voice seemed to be saying from the past, either her husband or her 

son. She hadn’t thought they sounded anything alike, but here they were 

together inside her head. 

When the buttons had found their holes, and Tsune had straightened the 

sleeves and collar, Etsuko had leaned against the bed, then looked down to 

see her feet still wearing battered zoris. The dress felt silky and smooth, but 

her own skin seemed so wrinkled. 

“Be patient, you say. Wait! Always wait! How long?” The words were 

circling around and around and Etsuko kept seeing how Masayuki would 

turn a lichee, gently tearing the shell into one long peel. “Until I die?” This 

voice that spoke belonged to a young man, his hair slicked back into a 

pompadour high on his forehead. 

Tsune’s hair was clipped short at the sides, a little longer in the back; and the 

grey wool suit she wore did nothing to make her appear younger. She looks 

like my mother, Etsuko thought, as Tsune bustled about, searching through 

drawers for stockings and soft slip-on shoes. She wondered if Masayuki 

would limp with a cane. His weakened ankle might make his walk unsteady. 

Perhaps he would slump, round-shouldered like his father. 

“Why do boys want more?” she asked herself. “More love, more food, more 

money?” Wrapped up in a piece of toweling, hidden inside a tin can beneath 

a board under the bed, the sepia-toned picture of the two of them after their 

15

simple wedding was kept. Along with the certificate the boss man from the 

construction company had pressed into her hand after the funeral. It had 

come in a stiff creamy colored envelope. “A bond,” he had said and she 

hadn’t understood his words. “It won’t help you now. This needs time to 

grow. We’re so sorry for your loss. It’s the best we can do.” Masayuki had 

wanted the money. 

In Tsune’s white husband’s house, Etsuko had seen the photograph framed 

in dark mahogany and hanging on the living room wall. She had left a smear 

of her fingertip as she touched the half of herself, remembering the fine long 

neck her family had praised. Her hair, thick and shiny. She hadn’t 

remembered herself as being happy, only startled by the sudden flash of 

white light. 

Masayuki could always a find a way to change her meaning. Tricky boy. 

“Sunday! You said Sunday soon we would go downtown to buy me shoes.” 

Etsuko had shaken her head. “I say someday.” Tsune had never demanded 

much. Always busy, she would wash dishes or sweep the floor. She kept her 

face turned away even when her brother started to fuss and shout. 

“I’m the man of this family!” Masayuki finally yelled, stomping his bad 

ankle. 

Etsuko brushed the loose strands of her pulled back hair out of her eyes. She 

felt her skin begin to burn with her own anger, her own shame. Masayuki 

had no respect. After all the long hours she put in cleaning other houses and 

working in the fields to put simple food on the table, to make a home—how 

dare this boy call himself a man? He had grown taller and more handsome. 

Etsuko had overheard silly girls gossiping about what a kiss from those lips 

would be like. Still, he put nothing toward the household. Tsune cooked and 

cleaned. All Masayuki thought of was himself. 

She grabbed her son’s upper arm, jerking him off-balance. “Boy,” she hissed 

through her teeth. “No man.” She pushed Masayuki away from her, then 

watched as he stumbled, helplessly throwing her arms up into the air. 

Muttering under his breath, he stormed out of the kitchen to slam his 

bedroom door behind him. 

Etsuko could hear herself breathing in short little gasps. She went back to 

stand next to her endless ironing, the steam rising from the hot metal. Anger 

she understood: fat customers who tried to edge their way in front of her, 

Mrs. Littlejohn insisting she put in extra time with no extra pay. “Tomorrow, 

16


he be better.” Etsuko spoke aloud even though she knew Tsune wouldn’t 

answer. 

Maybe raising Tsune had been too easy. Etsuko didn’t know what the girl 

ever thought about, how she felt about being pulled out of school to help 

earn money. And here she was, bent over beside Etsuko’s bed, carefully 

sliding white anklets over her mother’s toes. Tsune’s hair was more grey 

than black now. The two sides of the bob cut parted to expose the back of 

her neck. Quietly, Etsuko raised one hand, wondering briefly what it would 

be like to touch the skin, before she let her fingers fall back. 

As Tsune rolled her wheelchair into the dining hall, Etsuko glanced up at all 

the people gathered in one room. Everyone, even the other residents leaning 

on their canes and sitting in chairs with dressing robes pulled tight around 

them, were waiting. Some bored youngsters were lingering close to the 

windows. For two ugly people, Tsune and her husband had managed to have 

attractive children with reddish-brown hair. Their lips were cupid-shaped 

and pouty. Their eyes had strange grey shades circling a pale brown iris. 

“Okasan, my mother, had me and a brother, Masayuki. And now there’s 

three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren,” Tsune stopped, slowing 

the wheelchair to explain to a staff worker. Etsuko lifted up her head at the 

sound of her son’s name, but she didn’t understand the rest of the sentence. 

What she saw was how Tsune’s husband walked out from the crowd to stand 

close, to slide one arm around his wife’s waist. 

In their best dreams, rocking their infant son in his cradle, she and her 

husband had imagined Masayuki with a tiny, graceful wife from Yamaguchi 

Perfecture. They would have money to send him to study in Japan. He would 

return to help his father with their growing farm. Etsuko squirmed, trying to 

turn around, searching for the face of her son. She felt Tsune lay one hand on 

her shoulder. 

And then everyone in the room started clapping as Etsuko was rolled to the 

head of a table. A huge sheet cake with burning candles was spread before 

her. She blinked at the bright points of light, the sound of all those pairs of 

hands striking each other. 

His black head had been cradled on his shoulder, his arms searching for the 

box beneath the bed. Masayuki had been flat out on his belly. For light, a 

single candle was pushed out before him. His open palm and spread fingers 

had slammed the floor when he realized what he wanted wasn’t there. 

17

Etsuko had backed out the door slowly, silently closing the narrow seam. He 

had looked like a boy who had fallen, not a grown man at all. 

Twenty-five years old and Masayuki hadn’t married. He was a clerk in a fish 

store who spent his days scaling gills, chopping off heads and tails. Etsuko 

told herself, maybe it was time. She hadn’t expected the years to pass as they 

had. She had wanted to use the money to pay off the last of her husband’s 

debts, the ones he had inherited from his own father. 

“Tsune and I, we have nothing,” she told her son. Yellowed, the envelope 

still bore a stain from he cut flowers Etsuko had held during the funeral. 

When she offered it to Masayuki, she saw how his fingers wanted to pull the 

paper from her grasp. Still, she held on. “You borrow. You pay back.” 

Masayuki hadn’t even looked at her as he took the certificate: “Yes, of 

course I will.” He blinked, and she knew he was seeing cities on the 

mainland: Sacramento, maybe San Francisco or Seattle. 

Etsuko had known the words were empty. She grabbed one ear like the 

handle of a jug, as she had done when he was a child, and pulled his face 

close to her own. “Promise,” she insisted. 

Playing with the crumbs on her plate, Etsuko thought the frosting had been 

too sweet. It had been a moist white cake with bits of dried fruit scattered 

throughout. Tsune had cut the first big piece and placed it before Etsuko 

after she had blown out the candles. After four tries, everyone had laughed 

as she waved her napkin in the air to blow the smoke away. 

When Tsune’s husband asked her what she had wished for on her birthday, 

her daughter had to translate the question, and then Etsuko couldn’t seem to 

remember. The bright lights cast so many shadows. Voices chattered all 

around her until it all became a buzz, like a mosquito humming beside her 

ear. For a moment, she thought she was home, outside in the yard, just as the 

sun was going down. In the cooling day, there had been her bird of paradise 

to water, new ti leaf shoots to tie up. All that spoiled fruit fallen to the 

ground. Last night’s wind had broken another branch off the lichee tree. So 

old, it’s sad, she nodded to herself as she stepped around, fingers trailing 

over the bark. Masayuki would miss the shading leaves, Etsuko argued with 

herself. Reluctantly, she decided. In the shed is the hatchet: “Tomorrow, it 

all comes down.” 

18


Sharon Hashimoto teaches at Highline Community College in Des Moines, 

Washington. Her short stories have appeared in North American Review, Crab 

Orchard Review, Tampa Review, Shenandoah, THEMA and others. Her book of 

poetry is The Crane Wife, co-winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize and published by 

Story Line Press in 2003. She received a NEA creative writing fellowship for poetry 

in 1989. 

19

SKIN DEEP 

Anu Kandikuppa 

To: Kindergarten Oak 

From: Manju Nohria 

Re: Daily update 

Date: November 11 th 

Dear Mrs. Clayton and Mrs. Simpson, 

I am the mother of Anya Nohria in your class. I have been in your country 

for only two years and do not know how to drive. Therefore I am writing to 

you with reference to the update email that you sent the parents yesterday. 

You may know that Anya is our only child. She never went to school before 

Kindergarten, as you may also know. Her father, Dr. Vinod Nohria, has 

much respect for your school and that is the only reason I parted with her 

and sent her to your class. Anya is my heart. But with great deliberation and 

after considering your email for a long time, I wish to protest the Self- 

Portrait that you have asked her to prepare. 

Almost since she began going to school in September, Anya has not been 

herself. As you may know, she is a shy child, although she cannot fail to be 

brilliant one day because of her Papa’s brilliance, and myself an M.A. in 

Hindi Literature. At first, I thought she must be sad because of the new 

place, the new people, and the new customs. So I supported her fully. Every 

day I waited outside for her school bus to arrive from school. Every day I 

read to her for twenty minutes exactly from the books on the Book List you 

gave the parents. Over and over I read to her the books about the cat with a 

hat, the black bear picking blueberries on the hill, and the pig riding a horse 

in the Wild West. In Udaipur, a city in the state of Rajasthan in the 

northwestern part of India where I grew up and where Anya was born, the 

pigs spend most of their time in the gutters and are despised, so I explained 

to Anya why the pig on the horse is pink and meant to be loved. I learned 

about hamsters and I made cookies and brownies, and I counted coins and 

rolled balls and took out twelve markers every day for her artwork. I waited 

and waited for Anya to be joyful and to begin to read by herself her first 

words, already at age five. But since September, she has only become more 

and more quiet, refusing me politely and inserting her hanger into her coat 

20


by herself and pushing away the cookies. No, thank you, Mom, she says. 

Gone is the Anya who would clap her hands and scream with joy when I 

jump at her from behind a door. 

All this is long but I want to show how she has not been herself since the 

start of school, in spite of her father’s brilliance as a Doctor of Nuclear 

Physics, and myself an M.A. in Hindi Literature specializing in Poetry. But 

from your email of yesterday, I know now what is wrong and that is the Self- 

Portrait! From the first day of school, when she jumped down all the steps of 

the bus to tell me about it, I know Anya is working on her Self-Portrait. At 

that time, she was only worried whether she would be able to draw it well. 

“Mummy, will the picture look like me?” she asked. I embraced her again 

and again and said it would look like her, just like her perfect round face, her 

almond eyes, her sharp nose, her gulabi mouth. I understand that gulabi is a 

foreign word to you but there is no English word for the beauty of the gulab, 

queen of flowers. And I waited and waited for her to finish her Self-Portrait. 

Then your photo came yesterday and it was just like a clap of thunder when I 

looked at Anya’s face and neck in the colour of “Brown” in the Self-Portrait. 

This is the reason my Anya hangs her face! My Anya is not brown-coloured. 

Anya’s skin colour is not the same as the colour of the skin of Wei or Marisa 

who I have noticed are declaring their skin to be “Peach.” Anya is not pure 

white like the children Ashton, Delilah, Mabel, Jack, Jared, Jennifer, 

Spencer, and Sara or like the skin of the child David, whose forefathers, I 

believe, are from Africa. Her skin is different from the skins of all these 

children. In particular, Anya’s skin is golden-yellow like my own skin, a 

colour sometimes called wheatish, a colour that, even in India, only some 

people are endowed with including some females from the state of Rajasthan 

like myself, a colour prized for its glow when the light of the sun falls on it, 

never for too long of course. And now every day Anya walks into her 

classroom she will see hanging on the wall this terrible image of herself that 

is not her colour at all. 

This is the reason my Anya hangs her face. I know this even though Anya’s 

father, being a man, is unmindful of the importance of the issue and 

concerned only about how well Anya drew the Self-Portrait and says that 

Anya must learn to draw better so that both of her eyes look at the same 

thing and her chin is not pointing to one side. I am aware from Anya that she 

has used crayons made by the Crayona Company for her Self-Portrait and 

she has told me there is no Crayona colour that more closely represents her 

skin. I hereby inform you that I am going to write to the Crayona Company, 

attention of their General Manager to ask them to prepare the appropriate 

colour to depict the skin of wheatish-complexioned females from the 

21

northwestern part of India, in particular the state of Rajasthan. Upon hearing 

from them, I will write and inform you of further steps you may take to 

correct this big mistake. 

Yours respectfully, 

Mrs. Manju Nohria, B. A., M.A. 

To: General Manager, Crayona Company 


Re: 


Dear Sir or Madam, 

I was born in India and am living in your country for the last two years. I 

have a beautiful daughter called Anya whose age is five. I am writing this 

email to you after great deliberation because Anya was only able to use 

Crayona crayon of Brown colour to colour the skin of her neck and face in 

the Self-Portrait she prepared in her class. This experience will ravage Anya 

for the whole duration of her life. 

I fully believe that Crayona can address this vital matter by preparing a 

crayon to represent the correct colour for golden-skinned females from the 

state of Rajasthan in the northwestern part of India. At the start I must tell 

you that I am a bit bothered so my email is very long, but I hope you will 

read it fully because of its great importance. I know that people are helpful in 

America. It is a goodness that comes from living a safe and secure life. For 

one whole year after I came to America I did not even go outside our gate 

and even though Anya’s father tried to teach me, I did not learn to drive. 

May I no longer expect that he will take me where I need to go, I asked him. 

May I no longer expect to be cared for? Slowly I began to go out and now I 

go walking sometimes. Everyone looks at me with friendly eyes. Hi, they 

say in the way they have, although I was told that one must say hi only to 

someone one knows. When I talk, everyone stops and listens very carefully 

with pleasant smiles on their faces. 

Therefore I decided to write to you about this very critical Brown colour 

issue, which I came to know just like a clap of thunder when the school 

22


email came yesterday. For long, I have noticed that Anya is no longer her 

bright self and now I know it is because of the Self-Portrait! For your 

reference I have attached the photo that shows the Self-Portraits of all the 

children. There are twelve children in Anya’s class and their Self-Portraits 

are shown in two rows in the photo. Now look at the girl at the end of the 

first row. She is my Anya. You can see her name written under the Self- 

Portrait: Anya Nayantara Nohria. Colour of Eyes: Black. Colour of Skin: 

Brown. In her Self-Portrait, you cannot see exactly how beautiful she is. She 

is only five years old and still learning to draw, but I attached a photo of her 

so you can see for yourself. I attached a photo of myself as well, sitting on 

my swing in my gulab garden in Udaipur. Please open all these pictures and 

look at them carefully. Is there anything the same between the colour of her 

skin in Anya’s Self-Portrait and the real colour of her skin or my skin? 

Perhaps you will understand the horror more when you know where I am 

from. I belong to the great Indian subcontinent, in particular, I was born in 

the Lake City of Udaipur in the state of Rajasthan, which is in the 

northwestern part of the country. For more than three hundred years, my 

forefathers attended the court of the Maharanas of Udaipur who, you may 

know, fought valiantly against the Mughals and preserved their land. My 

ancestors, my great-great-grandfather and my great-grandfather, had their 

own quarters in the famous Lake Palace in Udaipur, which is much bigger 

than a church and made of white marble and has stood unmoving for 

centuries while the clear waters of the lake rise and fall around it. 

Historically, the females in my family, including my mother and her mother 

before her, have always possessed skin smooth as silk and with the colour of 

beaten gold, a colour sometimes called wheatish. Skin as valuable as 

jewelry, skin the envy of every female in my country, skin meant to be 

pampered and spoiled like a favorite child, skin that, never exposed to the 

sun, remained undefeated by it. As a child, I would stand and look for a very 

long time at the paintings, hanging high on the walls, of the ladies with their 

marble skin, lying proudly on silk divans, being gently fanned by attendants 

with long fans made from peacock feathers, and I longed with all my heart to 

grow up so that I could be like them. I was born in 1982 but people will not 

believe it when they see my face. They say in wonder, my dear Manju, you 

look eighteen! My mother tells a story of how my skin was so milky as a 

baby that she could see where I was on her bed at night even without a lamp 

and how visitors would shade their eyes as if from the brightness when they 

saw me. When I was twelve she showed me how to prepare a smooth paste 

for anointing on my skin using milk that has retained its cream, grated 

almonds, a little bit of gram flour mixed with turmeric, honey, and lemon 

juice. When I came to America, my mother told me, Manju, every day you 

must perform the ritual with the freshly prepared paste and every day you 

23

must use a blend of oils and perform a yogic massage of each of your face 

muscles with the tips of your fingers to stimulate the effective flow of the 

blood to your face. 

No doubt my rituals take up a lot of my time. But does not everyone have 

something that they must protect most vigorously? 

Skin oils one’s passage through the world. When my father saw my mother, 

he chose her for her skin. My father is also from Rajasthan, from a town fifty 

kilometers away from Udaipur to be exact, where he performs priestly 

functions, like his father before him, at the world-famous temple there. 

Visiting Udaipur in 1974, he went for dinner to his friend’s house, and there 

he saw my mother, the sister of his friend, for the first time. Often, my father 

tells of how he first saw only the arm that she had extended to serve him 

daal, her face and body appropriately covered. As was correct she was 

completely silent. Jamuni-coloured glass bangles alternating with gold ones 

shone on the skin of her arms and tinkled like bells every time she moved 

her arm from the vessel of daal to his plate then tumbled down to gather in a 

band at her wrist like a rainbow caught in sunlight. Immediately, he asked 

for her hand and they were married that same month. The same sort of story, 

I believe, with my husband, Anya’s father, who saw me in Udaipur from 

behind the pallu of my sari, six years ago. After the tea, he waited with his 

mother and father. My mother stood quietly in the doorway, watching me, 

but my father came to me as I was swinging on my swing in my rose garden, 

thinking of how well my flowers had bloomed that year, not wanting to leave 

them. He stopped my swing and laid his hand on my head and he said, 

Manju, accept Vinod. No more is it going to be possible to live a life of 

leisure here as your mother did. Everything has already changed. And I 

looked at the boy sitting steadfastly on the sofa inside and I decided, for my 

father, to accept him. And when I knew I was going to have a child, I prayed 

and prayed and my prayers were answered and my child was born my 

colour, a colour as if God had dissolved a bar of the precious metal in a glass 

of milk. 

And now, imagine my Anya’s life: every day she walks into her classroom, 

she will see pinned up on the wall of her classroom this image, this terrible 

streaked image in completely the wrong colour. It is sapping her very 

vitality. Therefore, dear Madam, I am writing with my urgent request for you 

to address this very important issue. Since your company has experience 

preparing so many colours of crayons, I believe that you will be able to 

easily create one that will correctly depict the skin of wheatish-complexioned 

females from the state of Rajasthan in the northwestern part of India. 

24


I anxiously wait to hear from you and assist you with any information you 

need as you prepare this additional crayon colour. 

Thank you. 



To: Manju Nohria 

From: Ms. Clayton 

CC: Dr. Forrester, Ms. Simpson 

CC: Vinod Nohria 

Re: Your email 


Dear Manju, 

Thank you for your email of November 11 th , which we reviewed very 

carefully. We appreciate your noting that both you and Vinod trust The 

Newton School and the Kindergarten Oak classroom with your wonderful 

little girl Anya! We have a great, diverse group of children this year for 

which we are extremely grateful. We are enjoying Anya very much! She is 

such a wonderful, mature child. She’s doing very well and making great 

contributions to our diverse classroom, as you will learn when you attend our 

upcoming conference. 

We are sorry to hear that you have concerns with Anya’s portrait. Anya 

worked very hard on it and we all felt it turned out very well. We did speak 

with her yesterday about whether she is uncomfortable with the colours or 

any other aspect of her portrait and we are happy to report that she is 

completely satisfied with the results. In fact, she asked us when she could 

begin work on her full-length image! 

We spoke to Vinod this morning with this information as well. 

I hope this reassures you. Please do not hesitate to give us a call if you would 

like to discuss further. 

Our regards, 

Ms. Clayton and Ms. Simpson 

25

To: Ms. Clayton and Ms. Simpson 


Re: Your email 


Dear Mrs. Clayton, 

Thank you again for your email of yesterday and for spending the time to 

discuss the issue of Anya’s Self-Portrait when I called you this morning. It is 

unfortunate that we could not complete our talk because you had to place the 

phone down so urgently before I finished talking, but I am writing to you so 

that you may read this email and think more about these issues at your 

leisure. It is very kind of you to talk to my husband but please understand 

that he is a very busy man. Being so busy, he, of course, only concerns 

himself with issues such as how well Anya draws and that she should learn 

to draw better so that both of her eyes are looking at the same thing and her 

chin is rounded not crooked and her eyelashes do not look like sticks. 

I am also distressed to learn that you believe that Anya is satisfied with her 

Self-Portrait. If she thinks she is satisfied, it is only because there is no way 

for her to correctly represent herself at the present time. I, Anya’s mother, 

am the only one who can understand the gravity of the matter and I will 

contact you again as soon as I hear from Crayona, with whom my 

communication has taken place as scheduled. 

Thank you 



26




Re: 



I wrote an email to you on November 11 th with my urgent request for a new 

colour of crayon and included photos of myself and my daughter Anya to 

help you prepare it. I have waited three days and I am writing again because 

I have not heard from your company regarding my letter, which I have 

attached to this email as well. 

This is a critical matter therefore please respond as soon as possible. 





Re: 

Date: November17 th 


I wrote to you about a new colour of your crayon in my email of November 

11 th and my email of November 14 th . It is now six days since I first brought 

this vital matter to your attention. I am writing because I have not heard from 

your company regarding my letters, both of which I have attached to this 

email as well. 

I do not believe it should take you so long to send me back an email. I have 

provided all the relevant information to you. This is a vital matter therefore 

please respond. 



27



Re: Crayona crayons 

Date: November 23 rd 


I wrote to you about the colour of your crayons in my emails dated 

November 11 th , 14 th , and 17th. I have also called and left you three messages 

on your phone. It is now twelve days since I first wrote and provided you 

with the opportunity to prepare a new crayon colour that will correctly depict 

the skin colour of wheatish-complexioned females from the state of 

Rajasthan in the northwestern part of India with which my daughter Anya 

can prepare another, accurate portrait of herself. 

I do not believe it should take you so long to write me back an email. I 

believe I have provided all the relevant information to you and this is a very 

vital matter, therefore please respond. 

Please be advised that, in light of the deeply important nature of the matter, I 

will unfortunately be unable to rest until the matter is addressed. 


Mrs. Manju Nohria, B.A., M.A. 

Anu Kandikuppa is an economist and a candidate in the MFA Program for Writers 

at Warren Wilson College, North Carolina. She lives in Boston with her family and is 

online at www.anukandikuppa.com. 

28

HEARTBREAK 

Wah-Ming Chang 


The year 2008 was the fifth anniversary of the death of Leslie Cheung. He 

died jumping out a window. All but one of his obituaries attributed cause of 

death to suicide. The exception had been written by me: I had used the word 

“heartbreak” instead of “suicide.” Today I recognize the sentimentality of 

this claim. Cheung had killed himself. What had caused his death was 

gravity. I imagine the act of defenestration to involve a mixture of elation 

and terror, with neither, in each its totality, unrelated to the other. The arms 

cannot help but strike out for balance, the legs tensed for the landing, the 

head bent forward perhaps to cushion itself—a measurement, in a way, of 

life meeting death. 

I have several photographs of him from the winter of 2002, and in the 

majority of them he has a sword in his hand. This hand with the sword never 

wavers, acting as a weight while the rest of his body is always a slender blur, 

as though motion were relegated only to flesh and not to metal. The portraits 

had been taken over the span of a weekend that winter, in preparation for a 

lengthy profile about the tenth anniversary of his film Farewell, My 

Concubine. The following spring, he jumped from the twenty-fourth floor of 

the Mandarin Orange Hotel. 

In 2008 a film festival was held in his honor in Vancouver, and I went. At 

the last minute I packed the photographs. 

It was only in Vancouver, where he’d retired from his singing career, from 

1990 to 1995, that Cheung had enjoyed any peace. Some believed he’d 

chosen Canada to treat his depression. Clinical depression, in addition to an 

impossible relationship with fame as a pop singer and a film star, had undone 

him. After his death, speculation about the depression varied widely, the 

most popular touching on his sexuality. Though he had openly discussed his 

partner in interviews, many of his fans had believed him to be heterosexual, 

or, at the very least, a moody eccentric. 

Later, his partner revealed that Cheung had tried to commit suicide once 

before, in 2002. 

On my first night in Vancouver, in a Chinese restaurant down the street from 

my hotel, my waiter studied the photographs, which I’d spread out on my 

little corner of the table. The sword in Cheung’s hand especially arrested him. 

He asked, “Were all these taken by you?” 

29

“Yes,” I said, “though I’m not a photographer.” 

My waiter, a graduate student from Beijing, had not intended to attend the 

film festival, but in the end he asked to join me. Later I would regret this 

impulse to welcome him, not because he turned out to be a nuisance or 

imposed on my time—indeed, after this weekend together, I wouldn’t see 

him again for another year, in another restaurant, in the Chinatown of Paris, 

both of us in deep negotiations with our respective wives, one toward union, 

the other dissolving it—but because the rain, white and opaque, had settled 

deep inside me. I am possessive of the rain, and I couldn’t be sure that my 

mood would remain friendly and casual toward the end of the night, as it was 

now. In any case, by the end of the trip I resolved that it was best to keep my 

solitude on such excursions intact, and the solitude of my heroes as well. 

The daylong festival was called “Farewell, Leslie Cheung,” with Farewell, 

My Concubine billed as the final film in the showcase. We watched three 

films: He’s a Woman, She’s a Man, A Better Tomorrow, and Days of Being 

Wild, varying from romantic comedy to violent thriller to atmospheric drama. 

By the time we left the theater for a break, it was nearly dark. He’d been able 

to steal several hours away from work, and had taken this opportunity to 

wear his favorite leather jacket and to smoke nonstop. We had half an hour 

before Farewell started, so when the practical matter of food and drink 

entered the conversation, my waiter suggested we walk down Carrall Street 

toward Livingstone Park, in the direction of a rice shop he frequented on 

weekends. We couldn’t find the rice shop, though. Perhaps he had the wrong 

address, or it had shut down since he’d last visited. For a while, our 

surroundings took on the hues of the films we had just watched, at moments 

a dream-like panorama of gauzy greens, then at others a stretch of grays and 

blacks, metal and cigarettes. We were like two ghosts infiltrating the ashen 

life here, refusing to be jostled from the fast-flowing veins of the city. 

But in reviewing Days of Being Wild with my waiter, I realized suddenly that, 

until that day, I had never seen any of Cheung’s films before in their entirety. 

The memory of watching them had always been strong—especially with past 

lovers inside dark cinemas—yet in reality I had caught only snippets of them, 

or remembered snippets, as with dreams. Indeed, my dreams seemed to last 

for years because of his films. For this reason I had the selfish urge to watch 

Farewell on my own that night. My waiter and I had watched three films 

together, but the fourth, the last, according to a flimsy logic that took on a 

30


desperate strength, deserved its own stage. 

I broke away from the spell of the rainy evening with an excuse to return to 

my hotel room. A migraine had come over me, I said. My waiter did not 

seem concerned. Perhaps he saw through my pretense. He dropped his 

cigarette and shook my hand thoughtfully, and told me to visit his restaurant 

again the next day, that he knew a cure for aches suffered in distant cities. 

Then he returned to his job, and I wandered the park a little more, until I 

came across a brightly lit cul de sac filled with smoky stalls selling snacks, 

clothing, and trinkets. I sat down in one that served Vietnamese and Chinese 

dishes. As I ordered, the other customers paid and left. Now I had a stall and 

a cook entirely to myself. The canopy overhead assured me that I was dry 

and that the outside world was not. In the meantime, the cook was washing a 

vat of rice. I became lulled by the sounds of rice and rain, two cadences for 

which I have an immediate affinity. Depending on the notes each strikes, I 

am lulled to calm or to excitement, sometimes experiencing both at the same 

time. When this happens, the world opens itself up without thought or 

prejudice. An equilibrium in duality. I listen for every single grain of rice 

and each drop of water rounding out the air, how they collectively nourish 

and regenerate all living things. The smallness of rice, the greatness of a 

storm—we are equal in size to whatever we see. 

Though my surroundings looked nothing like what my waiter had described 

of his missing rice shop, I pretended I had found it, and even convinced 

myself, to atone for my lie, that I would return to his restaurant late tonight, 

not tomorrow as he’d suggested, so I could report my discovery. I am 

possessive of the rain, yes, but I am also prone to fits of reversals. As I 

waited for my food, as I listened to the rice and the rain intermingle, now 

rising together, now separating into their own corners, I imagined my 

waiter’s reaction. By then I would have watched Farewell from beginning to 

end. I would be trembling still with an absolute euphoria, knowing that I had 

just witnessed an actor live deep inside himself, the only place of release. 

Wah-Ming Chang has received fellowships for fiction from the New York 

Foundation for the Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Urban Artist 

Initiative, and the Bronx Writers' Center. Her fiction has appeared in Mississippi 

Review and Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, nonfiction in Words 

without Borders and the Asian American Writers' Workshop's Open City, and 

photography in Drunken Boat and Open City. She is currently working on a photo 

essay about the essence of the dance rehearsal. 

31

THOUGHTS OF SINKING 

Kaitlin Solimine 

32 

Novel Excerpt, Empire of Glass 

In Beijing, we judge the seasons by the shifting of sounds: in Autumn, the 

pigeons drift above the sloped roofs with their whistling tail feathers (flutes 

attached by urbanites in accordance with ancient traditions); in winter, 

there’s the tick tick tick of the heating furnaces turning on, each building’s 

rusted pipes cracking against the descending cold; in late Spring, dust storms 

smatter the windows and raze the city streets in yellow haze; in early 

Summer, we wait for the cicadas to brashly announce their arrival. Vastly 

outnumbering the lucky magpies, our cicadas signal the arrival of the real 

heat. As if they too are angered by the spoiling of a less-balmy spring, the 

insects scream their displeasure, harried bodies dropping to the streets where 

hard shells crack melodiously under the wheels of unsuspecting bicyclists. 

Beneath a canopy of cicada chorus, we rolled Li-Ming in her wheelchair to 

Chenxi’s last and only diving meet. Lao K, our American homestay student 

for the past year, planned to join us at the Beijing Normal University pool 

after school, promising to bring Li-Ming’s Fed-Zorki camera to chronicle 

Chenxi’s assured win (those days, the device always hung around Lao K’s 

spring-tanned neck like a talisman). The heat that day could have felt 

oppressive. We could have cursed the impenetrable wall of cicada sound, but 

we didn’t. Li-Ming’s wheels rolled over the occasional flailing cicada, but 

she didn’t flinch. She wasn’t entirely with us anymore; her head lilted 

dreamily, hands spread flat on her thighs. 

Crunch. 

Lilt. 

Crunch. 

Lilt. 

Crunch. 

“Lili is doing an inward dive,” Chenxi said, distracting us from the insect 

massacre. “So I have to do an inward one-and-a-half somersault then.” 

Everything Lili did, Chenxi must surpass: although our daughter only began 

diving lessons a year earlier, she’d already progressed to the fourth form. 

Her instructor, Mr. Peng, called Chenxi a ‘tenacious girl.’ I didn’t have the 

heart to inform him she was only trying to please Li-Ming. When Mr. Peng 

named Chenxi the ‘next Fu Mingxia,’ China’s gold medal Olympian diver, 

Li-Ming beamed. Li-Ming wanted our daughter not only to be comfortable


in water, but to conquer it; Li-Ming herself hadn’t done more than dip a toe 

in a body of water, a holdover of her harrowing experience during the 

Jiangxi floods. Whenever Mr. Peng spoke highly of Chenxi, I gripped my 

wife’s shoulder, pretending to believe our daughter was capable of so much 

bravado when within my stomach a knot grew, a knot that would twist upon 

itself from that point onward. 

“You will do well,” Li-Ming said through chapped lips. 

I attempted reason: “Don’t push yourself. You don’t want to get hurt.” 

Chenxi looked at me, forced a frown. 

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’ve been on the 7.5 meter platform for three weeks 

now. It’s easy. Just like a bird!” Our daughter skipped to the university 

pool’s entrance and we watched her as I tipped Li-Ming’s wheelchair up the 

stairs, one by one by one. 

“Lao Chen, I can walk,” Li-Ming said, propping herself into standing, but I 

forced her into her seat. 

“Don’t push yourself.” For weeks, the radiation made her typically-sturdy 

frame fragile. Chenxi made light of the situation, joking that eventually her 

mother’s bones would be as airy as a bird’s and she could fly away to judge 

us from the skies. Lao K said Li-Ming would only fly as far as the ceiling so 

that we’d always have a view of her wings. Both descriptions unnerved me. 

My legs shook despite my wife’s lighter weight. She still had a form after all 

and she still weighed enough for carrying her to be a burden. Finally, we 

made it to the gymnasium’s lobby. 

“I’m so sick of sitting,” Li-Ming said. “You know it’s not in my nature to be 

so still.” 

“I know,” I said and she reached up to the handlebars, placing her hands atop 

mine. I pushed her across the waxed floors past trophies in dusty display 

boxes and photographs of young, lithe athletes on the wall. A banner 

drooped across the pool’s entrance, announcing the university swimming 

team’s All-Beijing Championship win the year prior. Everywhere one looked 

was evidence of accomplishment, success. I worried how this would affect 

my wife, so I walked especially briskly, but it was of no use. 

“Look at all these proud athletes,” Li-Ming said. “Didn’t you say you once 

beat Chiang Kai-Shek’s son in a track meet?” 

33

I paused. How had she remembered that? Maybe I should let her believe this. 

Maybe she’d be better off reaching the end of her life thinking her husband 

was once so quick-footed, so capable of crossing the line before all others. 

But the faces of the smiling athletes stared at me, admonishing me for ever 

considering lying to my wife. 

“No, that was my cousin, not me.” 

“Oh,” Li-Ming said as we reached the pool’s entrance and I finagled her 

wheelchair past the doors. “Well I’m sure you could’ve beat the 

Generalissimo’s son if given the chance.” 

“You overestimate me,” I said, rolling Li-Ming’s wheelchair onto the pool 

platform and toward the stands where spectators sat, rows of parents 

awaiting their child’s performance. Chenxi had already skipped into the 

women’s locker room to change into her bathing suit. 

“I don’t want to sit here,” Li-Ming said. “Take off my shoes. I want to put 

my feet in the water.” 

“Really?” 

She nodded. 

Despite my better judgment, I kneeled, knees sinking into a puddle, wet 

seeping through my cotton pants. I carefully untied her shoes and placed 

them at the foot of the stands, bundling her socks and stuffing them into the 

soles. I rubbed her dry heels, twisted the skin atop her bloated ankles in both 

directions. Her body had the feel of something long-since expired—when 

had she transitioned from something wholly alive to something slightly less? 

Where had I gone astray in this? When did I lose the ability to protect the 

women in my life from harm? Before I could reach a conclusion, my wife 

placed her hand atop mine, rubbing the bones of my fingers as I rubbed her 

ankles. 

“Thank you,” she said, sighing slightly, then nodded for me to escort her, 

arm-in-arm, to the pool deck. Behind us, the parents looked on, full of pity— 

that man, the dying wife, the two of them hobbling precariously toward the 

water. They probably worried we’d trip, that we’d fall into the pool and 

quickly drown, our bodies floating limply to the surface, eyes staring past the 

arched ceiling to the sky. How much we’d be able to see with our unblinking 

stare that they couldn’t. 

34


But of course we didn’t fall. We shuffled carefully to the edge, where the 

scent of chlorine flooded our noses. 

“Let’s sit here,” Li-Ming instructed, her voice cracking. Once a songstress, 

Li-Ming’s words now chafed against one another like the ragged rubbing of 

grasshopper wings. 

I wanted to tell those sad, downward peering eyes in the stands that Li-Ming 

was the best swimmer I’d ever known. She was so strong a swimmer she’d 

saved a man from drowning during the famous Jiangxi floods. But what was 

the use? Li-Ming didn’t swim anymore. The floods taught her too much 

about the power of water. I lifted her off her feet, positioning her heavy, 

rigid body at the side of the pool. Her round backside, sore from so much 

sitting, cushioned her landing. 

I rolled up my own pant legs then kicked off my shoes and placed them 

gingerly at my side. Our toes stretching in the water, it felt like we were 

young again even though I’d never swum in my life, and when we were 

young we had more pressing concerns than climbing to the diving platform’s 

highest rung. 

“If only your daughter had her mother’s round head, she’d enter the water 

more smoothly,” Mr. Peng’s hands spread atop my wife’s head, which, now 

bald, was covered with a magenta silk handkerchief painted with blue 

butterflies. Mr. Peng rubbed that handkerchief as if it could bestow good 

fortune upon him, as if Chenxi’s only downfall was that she’d inherited my 

large, square jaw. “Are you ready for your daughter’s debut?” 

Li-Ming nodded and I didn’t need to look at her face to see her smile. What 

pride is wasted on the dying. Our water-happy toes flexed and stretched, 

flexed and stretched, flexed and stretched. I couldn’t remember the last time 

my feet felt so unencumbered. The freedom was both liberating and stifling, 

like a caged bird released into the expansive, airy world beyond the bars. 

“Our debuting daughter better be safe,” I muttered to my own unsteady 

reflection. 

Mr. Peng tapped my shoulder and I looked up long enough to recognize 

those sunglasses he always wore, even on the indoor pool deck—he blamed 

an astigmatism, when really we knew he preferred the crowds not see his 

gaze lingering on his girls as they climbed up the board’s steps, their arms 

and chests dripping as they pushed their slick bodies out of the water. He’d 

35

never touched any of the girls inappropriately, but there was an 

uncomfortable closeness when he spoke to them; then again, perhaps parents 

are always protective of the bonds they share with their children, worried 

about a potential displacement by another adult. 

“Your daughter will do fine,” Mr. Peng said. “As we speak...” He nodded to 

the door to the women’s locker room which was slapping open, Chenxi 

marching with Lili on one side and Lao K on the other, all three of them 

arms locked. The girls strode in unison as if their appearance was to be timed 

with music and applause. Lao K, despite the fact she wasn’t diving, wore a 

red bathing suit that clung snugly to her tall, shapely body. Atop her chest 

swung Li-Ming’s camera enshrouded in some kind of plastic encasing. She 

had the air of proud motherhood, an affect I assumed she inherited from Li- 

Ming. Chenxi and Lili donned matching Beijing Youth Diving League suits 

in navy blue with angled white stripes. Their bodies paled in comparison 

with Lao K’s womanly frame. They were all bone, hips protruding, knees 

knocking, reminding anyone who looked at them of the awkward, selfconscious 

experience of adolescence. Chenxi didn’t seem to mind we were 

here to watch her, that despite our smiles, our proud faces, we were worried. 

What was it that worried us? We couldn’t explain to Chenxi that despite her 

eagerness to climb to the board’s highest rung, we’d once believed we were 

capable of equally impressive goals. How we’d once hoped for so much in 

our bodies, our ability to overcome heights, water, platforms, but how we 

could not overcome every difficulty. That this was what it meant to grow 

up—zhang da, 长大—despite the obvious fact that at a certain point we have 

grown as big, as tall, as we will ever be and yet we don’t really know any 

more than we did before. 

My bony, calloused toes still absently flexed and stretched. Li-Ming’s wide 

feet stopped fanning the water and, for a moment, fear flooded my body 

from my ankles to my throat—I worried I’d lost her altogether until I saw 

her arm lift, watched her hand waving persistently at our daughters. 

“Ba!...Ma!” Chenxi waved back as Lili scanned the stands for her own 

parents. Upon finding their prideful faces—her father, a professor of 

economics at Beijing Normal, with his signature eyeglasses and bowtie; her 

mother, a tall, thin bookkeeper at my danwei with long, straight hair and 

patient eyes—they smiled, nodded knowingly. Lili was the more stoic child. 

I didn’t dare inform Chenxi she wasn’t anything like her fearlessly 

independent friend. That we can never fully surpass the failures of our 

forbearers. 

36


Chenxi jogged happily to her mother’s side, seemingly unaware of Li- 

Ming’s bare legs and feet. “Did you see what Lao K did? She brought your 

camera! She’s going to take my photograph from under water!” Lao K 

walked over and stood beside Li-Ming. 

“Amazing,” Li-Ming said. From her seat, she gripped Lao K’s sculpted shin, 

rubbing her fingers along the stubbly blonde hairs as if to calm or subdue 

her—but who needed calming most? Either way, Lao K didn’t mind. 

Women’s intimacies were always lost on me, how they could rub one 

another’s legs, hold hands, and sleep beside one another on trains without 

one hint of sexual attraction. Now my wife and Lao K shared this physical 

relationship and although the American was supposed to be our ‘daughter,’ 

the nature of this disturbed me. Was I jealous? I dismissed the thought in 

time for Lao K to explain how she found a contraption capable of filming 

underwater scenes. 

“Mr. Wang’s shop has everything you could imagine,” Lao K said, winking 

at Li-Ming. “I said I needed to take photographs in a pool and he found this 

on his shelves.” 

While my wife and Lao K discussed the inventory at Wang’s, Chenxi 

examined Lao K’s rounded breasts rising with each breath, the girl’s hips, 

then looked to her own breasts and hips, clearly comparing sizes. Her gaze 

descended to Lao K’s thighs, how much more toned and muscular the 

American’s were than Chenxi’s, as if Lao K spent a life working in the fields, 

which we all knew wasn’t the case. Finally, Chenxi admired the differences 

between their ankles and feet. Chenxi had Li-Ming’s thick ankles, her flat, 

wide feet. The American’s were narrow, bony. When Lao K asked Chenxi 

what kind of photographs she should take, my daughter shuttered into 

awareness, shaking off whatever comparisons were built in the minutes 

before. 

“Whatever you want,” she said. “I trust you.” And with this, Lao K smiled, 

happy to receive Chenxi’s wholehearted approval. 

Mr. Peng summoned Lili and Chenxi to the base of the platform with the 

other competitors. There, they stretched and bended and jumped and hopped 

like soldiers readying for battle. How silly that the battleground was a diving 

board and the innocent bystanders were parents who wanted more happiness 

for their children than they’d experienced in their collective youth. But for 

what? Generation after generation played at this game: more and more 

opportunities spoilt upon their progeny when, in the end, each generation 

only craved more, and, despite the money, the jobs, the education, the homes, 

37

the next generation couldn’t bestow upon their children any more answers 

than those who came before them. Wasn’t it Li-Ming’s favorite poet Han 

Shan who told us, over a dozen centuries ago, to ‘Tell families with 

silverware and cars: what's the use of all that noise and money?’ But now, 

thanks to Deng Xiaoping, we had more noise. We had more money. And still 

the diving girls threw their arms over the heads, slapped at the air like tai chi 

practitioners. The performance was for our sake, rows of eager parents 

believing this was the right path for their children—the only path. The judges, 

two grim-looking middle-aged women with gray-streaked hair pulled into 

tight buns and one stout young man with rosy-hued cheeks, sat at a long 

table on the far side of the pool. They organized their scoring placards, 

seemingly unaware of the gymnastics happening beneath the diving board’s 

staircase, unapologetically preparing to disappoint most of the parents. 

Lao K. What was there to say about Lao K? She slid into the pool just beside 

Li-Ming’s feet and dunked her head under the water as casually as a seabird, 

her golden hair dampening into reddish brown. 

What happened next surprised even me: my wife, likely inspired by the sight 

of Lao K’s long tendrils floating happily on the blue surface, slipped loose 

the knot of her head scarf. The fabric, silk fluttering, floated to her lap. She 

shook her head and the motion—my wife shaking a head bereft of its once 

long, black strands—wasn’t so much as sad, not even pitiful. No, it was 

merely a relic of an older gesture, a gesture that once meant nothing (nothing 

but a misplaced flirtation?). As she did, I reached my fingers to comb the air, 

that invisible, once-was hair. 

Then I heard the snickers. The gasps. Hadn’t the crowd seen a bald head 

before? Yes, my wife was dying. Yes, she’d lost her hair in the latest belated, 

futile batch of chemotherapy treatments. As the snickering grew, Lao K 

propped herself atop the pool deck and glared into the crowd with so severe, 

so instinctively protective a look she silenced their gaping; still, Li-Ming 

didn’t notice the attention, nor Lao K’s response. My wife was too transfixed 

on our daughter, who now calmly climbed the stairs to the diving board’s 

highest rung. There she was—my oval-shaped head and strong jaw, now 

hers, hidden beneath a black rubber cap and Li-Ming’s thick calves flexing 

with each step. If only she’d known her true, underlying resemblance to Li- 

Ming. If only they could stand side-by-side to compare bodies—hairless 

twins. Only the shape of their heads would betray their symmetry. 

Chlorine smell now: Lao K sliding back into the water and paddling past Li- 

Ming to retrieve the camera with its clear plastic shield. She winked at my 

38


wife who smiled calmly back: what had they discussed in my absence? 

Women: would we ever know? 

“Tell me what you see under there,” Li-Ming said. 

Chenxi reached the end of the platform. She turned to face the back wall, 

calves flexing, heels descending and raising, twitching slightly with each 

slow, cautious pump. 7.5 meters. Lili. Inward somersaults. I thought of Li- 

Ming’s insistent desire for our daughter to be the best at everything. What 

did it mean? Was the best just better than what we’d been? Was the best 

what we didn’t have the heart, the stamina, the strength, the inheritance, to 

achieve? Weren’t we fooling ourselves in believing she was capable of this? 

Now my daughter was standing at the edge of a board the height of a twostory 

building and she was breathing the breath that would keep her body 

buoyant underwater and Lao K was inhaling deeply, plunging that honeyed 

hair beneath the surface of the pool. They inhaled together, speaking that 

language I never understood. My hands raised instinctively, about to clap, to 

plead with Chenxi to stop, but Li-Ming slapped them to my lap. 

Chenxi looked to her feet. 

We all held our breath as her toes lost their grip, but then, quickly, her body 

folded into itself in one-and-a-half spins and her arms extended above her 

head and—her legs passed upright—yes, her legs kept going until flap!— 

There was no straight entry. 

There were no arms perfectly extended (triceps firm, elbows locked). 

No stomach duly pinched against an exquisitely arched back. 

No legs lengthened to pointed feet, toes so curled they flicked the water like 

a feather. 

No, our daughter was not as perfect as Li-Ming imagined. She even betrayed 

Mr. Peng’s admiration; he walked sternly to the pool’s edge where Chenxi 

was about to surface. Leaning over, he whispered something to her rubbercapped 

head, something to which she nodded dutifully. The judges frowned, 

holding their placards above their heads in solidarity: 

4.5/10 – 4.5/10 – 4.5/10 

Our daughter was less than perfect. Much, much less so. 

39

Chenxi climbed up the silver ladder, watching as Lili ascended the platform, 

a soft, knowing smile painted on her friend’s lips—like Chairman Mao said, 

If you think just once about sinking, you’ll never be able to float. Lili wasn’t 

a thinker and was therefore incapable of sinking. Our Chenxi, on the other 

hand, had inherited her mother’s inquisitiveness, along with my necessity to 

trip just when the moment called to stand—with that, she’d always fear 

falling, failure. She’d looked down. 

Lao K finally surfaced after what seemed an interminable time, her cheeks 

puffing with fresh inhales, oxygen returning pink to her cheeks. 

“I got a good shot,” she said, water dripping down her forehead and into her 

briskly-fluttering eyes, but Li-Ming wasn’t listening. Li-Ming was tying her 

scarf back atop her bald head as if she’d suddenly experienced this odd 

nudity. Li-Ming was standing on her own, stomping barefoot through the 

puddles to her wheelchair sitting empty beside the stands, then recklessly 

wheeling it out the door while Lao K jogged beside her, telling her to sit, to 

slow down, to take it easy. 

“Man man de, Mama,” she said. “Mama, man man de.” The crowd gaped: 

the American called the Chinese woman ‘Mama.’ 

I sat on the edge of the pool, knowing the crowd was waiting for my next 

move. Let my wife throw her tantrum, I wanted to tell them. Let her believe 

in the Chenxi she believed in, her own childhood obscured by the child she’d 

birthed over a decade ago. Let her make Chenxi return to the competition for 

her next dive, to climb to an even higher platform and take one more spin in 

the air. I was done with pretending. Our daughter was below average, and 

whatever the reason—my head, her mother’s hotheadedness—it wasn’t 

worth pushing her anymore. What version of success had we so quickly 

taken to, anyhow? Dreams were only for the living. Didn’t Li-Ming know? 

We’d been writing the wrong story, the narrative faltering in the vision of 

our daughter’s body slipping past straight, legs making a long, horizontal 

splash, our ability to always be standing on the sidelines watching, cheering 

her on. What we should have written was the truth, if only we’d understood 

what it was that brought us together all those years ago in the shadowed 

pigsties of Jiangxi, what it was that made a child in the heat of summer, or 

made the cicadas sing, or made their bodies drop to the ground when full of 

too much song. The heat? The sky? This is what I meant about asking too 

many questions. I’d warned Chenxi of this once when she was only four 

years old and we were at her grandmother’s funeral in Nanjing. Chenxi had 

asked where Lao Lao had gone even though the woman’s ashes were stuffed 

40


into a heavy urn at the head of the table. She’s gone to heaven, I said, but 

Chenxi was persistent. Where’s heaven? She’d asked and when I pointed 

toward the ceiling, she asked, How is heaven in the sky? Can I see it? Can 

we get there by airplane? That was when I said the thing about asking too 

many questions. Although it silenced my daughter for the remainder of the 

afternoon, I later regretted teaching her this lesson, worried that maybe I’d 

stifled some childish belief that every question has an answer, that there’s 

someone, somewhere in this world, likely a parent or grandparent, who 

knows everything. 

I stood slowly, feeling the heat of many eyes boring their judgment into my 

back: How could he let his sick wife walk away? How could he let her 

believe their daughter was as good a diver as Lili? How could he allow an 

American to come to the rescue, the antithesis of what we’d been taught in 

our Little Red Books? I shrugged off their gazes and followed my wife and 

Lao K into the gymnasium lobby, down the corridor between the entrance 

hall and the locker rooms, where plaques glistened golden on the walls and 

more eyes, wide open, witnessed my failure to help my wife into her 

wheelchair. Instead, Lao K persuaded Li-Ming to sit. Our American 

daughter stood facing her Chinese mother with her bare arms tucked into her 

sides, wet body shivering. As I drew closer, I recognized the purple goose 

bumps raised along the flesh of her limbs. I recognized that quivering 

buttock flesh, the smell of hair and sweat and chlorine and… What use was 

there in recalling? I touched her shoulder and she didn’t jump. I ran my 

fingers through her hair and she didn’t flinch. I saw purple and blue, the skin 

attempting to pulse life back into the farthest reaches of her limbs. She was 

looking at Li-Ming and I was looking at the girl’s hair, the way I could lift it 

with one flick of my wrist, the weight of it damp, the density of gravity, our 

one true curse: Time. All the spinning that kept us believing the lies of our 

own origins. 

“Lao Chen!” Li-Ming called, but I couldn’t hear her. We were down a hall 

so deep even sound was marbled, spoken as in caves. 

“Lao Chen! Go get your daughter.” 

I released Lao K’s hair and when I did the American turned, her bare feet 

squealing against the linoleum. Her entire body seemed at attention with the 

sincerity and immediacy belonging only to youth: pink-red flushed cheeks, 

pricked nipples pushing through her thin red bathing suit, blonde hairs 

standing in columned attention on her long, golden arms. The camera 

straddled her breasts. The camera Li-Ming used all those years to chronicle 

Chenxi’s childhood now contained within it our daughter’s greatest failure: 

41

she’d tried. She’d climbed to the highest rung. She’d stood tall but then 

didn’t trust her feet would hold her. She’d spun in the air one turn too many. 

That camera. I reached out to remove the film from within it. 

“Ba! What are you doing?” 

“Lao Chen! Stop!” 

“Ba, give it to me!” Lao K snatched the camera from me as I was prying 

open the film’s container, as the first glimpses of light spoilt the edges of 

that final photograph—Chenxi’s failed entrance. Lao K slapped my hand and 

I dropped it to my hip. 

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” she said knowingly. But she knew, 

she insinuated. She knew me better than I knew myself. Was this what we’d 

loved about her, about all Americans? They always knew best, had all the 

answers, while we sat on the sidelines observing, forgetting to ask the 

questions for which the Americans had already prepared the answers. Li- 

Ming sat frowning behind our American daughter and a tear formed. She 

blinked away that same knowledge she and Lao K shared. How they knew 

everything and I was just the child overreaching. The child attempting to 

shield us from the knowledge that this—this photograph, this moment, this 

daughter—will never be enough. Bu. No. 

不 

Drowned legs, wasted strokes. 

“Don’t ruin the film,” Lao K said, protectively clutching the camera to her 

wet chest. “Let’s go get Chenxi.” She pushed me by the back, leading me to 

the pool, past the flapping plastic-stripped doors, the sad-eyed spectators 

who grew eager with the sight of their daughters’ bodies ascending the 

platform but still looked at us with embarrassment, as if we represented 

everything they wished not to acknowledge in the world. Outside, the cicada 

chorus crescendoed louder then abruptly fell to a dull hum. 

Li-Ming was still in the hallway in her wheelchair, unable to roll herself 

back to the stands to watch our daughter’s last dive. I didn’t know how in 

leaving Li-Ming alone we were actually entering the rest of our lives 

together: me and the American girl who would suddenly thrust herself onto 

our lives with the tenacity of a sand storm funneling down the streets of 

Wudaokou. 

42


“Ba! Lao K! I’m up!” Chenxi shouted. If she’d noticed our departure, it 

hadn’t fazed her. She was due for her second redemptive dive. She climbed 

the stair’s spokes, crested the board like a sunrise. Coach Peng stood crossarmed 

across the pool next to the seated judges. He still wore his sunglasses 

and a calm, unsmiling face. What did he see through those dark lenses? 

Although I’d never owned sunglasses, suddenly, I wanted more than ever to 

wear them, to wash the world in red and brown—to stamp out, once and for 

all, the unbearable honesty of sunlight peeling past the skylights to play with 

the pool’s surface, blinding us if we stared too long. 

“I’m coming, Sister,” Lao K shouted, jogging on tiptoes then dipping 

smoothly into the water, holding the camera to her eye and descending 

below the surface, beyond my reach. What she saw beneath the waves that 

day at the Beijing Normal University swimming pool I’d never know—if she 

ever developed that photograph, she never showed us. And Li-Ming was in 

no position to expose the film herself, her illness quickly devouring what 

was left of her, every bone, every lymph node and organ riddled with cancer 

in the coming weeks. But I will remember what I want of Lao K surfacing 

briefly for a breath, just long enough to shout to her sister: “Remember: 

don’t look down!” then submerging herself as Chenxi did exactly as Lao K 

reminded her not to—she looked to the water glistening meters below and as 

she did, her tentative toe grip on the edge of the board slipped. 

The crowd behind us gasped. 

Li-Ming shouted from the distance, “Lao Chen, do something!” as our 

daughter’s body faltered, as her feet struggled to retain their grip on the slick 

board, her knees bending to push herself off prematurely. But it was too late: 

Lao K was already underwater, already snapping the photograph that would 

last beyond our lives, those paper objects outliving the bodies they contain— 

this time, our daughter’s body, taut and perfectly-straight, slicing the water 

like a knife. Like perfection alone could heal us. Or at least our belief in it. 

She didn’t make a splash. 

“Did you hear that, Ba?” It wasn’t Chenxi’s voice, but Lao K’s, her proper 

Beijing accent with all it’s rolling ‘er’ sounds exaggerated. We were alone— 

Li-Ming had rolled herself home immediately following Chenxi’s 

redemptive dive and Chenxi went to McDonalds for her post-dive 

celebration with Lili’s family. Already, we’d lost our daughter to someone 

43

else. For now, this tall, slow American would have to take her place. “Ba, 

did you hear?” 

“Hear what?” 

“Hear how it’s so silent now.” 

I hadn’t realized we were to notice the changes in Beijing’s street sounds. 

The cicadas were a static background noise you learned to ignore. On the 

walk home, I hadn’t time to think about it—I was too consumed by the 

events that evening: Chenxi’s terrible dive and then her perfect one, a tear 

clinging to my wife’s eye, Lao K’s hair dipping beneath the water’s surface. 

But as we left the pool following in Li-Ming’s trail, the cicadas had indeed 

silenced their song-happy voices. Or had something else silenced them? The 

sky above us was misty with clouds and the first light of stars somehow 

reminded me of a tropical place although I’d never left China, only seen 

photographs of Hawaii and the Philippines and the Caribbean in the brightlycolored 

calendars tacked to the walls of my danwei’s head office, now called 

the Taiwan Machinery Corporation. Above us, the stars winked and danced, 

but we didn’t have time to watch them. Li-Ming awaited us at home, likely 

seething with anger: Over what? Chenxi’s terrible first dive? My inability to 

escort Li-Ming from the pool hall? The way I’d touched Lao K’s wet hair? 

What hadn’t I done? 

Lao K stopped below a willow with limbs that limped to the ground as if 

exhausted by the nature of being born a tree. She tilted her head to the sky. 

“What are you looking at? Hurry up, Li-Ming is waiting for us.” 

“Li-Ming can wait. She probably needs to be alone anyway. Besides, haven’t 

you noticed the stars?” 

First the cicadas and now this. I reluctantly peeled back my head to the 

cavern of black beyond the tree’s wispy limbs. 

“I haven’t seen this many stars in Beijing,” Lao K said. She was right. 

Tonight’s wind, brisk and chilled by northern gusts, must have cleared the 

air of any remaining dust or pollutants as it also fluffed our hair. There was 

an entire black sky above us with visible, sparkling stars. 

“What’s there to look at?” I asked, but Lao K ignored me. 

“Chenxi will be okay,” she said. 

44


I didn’t know how to respond, but the willow limbs bristled at a passing 

breeze and the cicadas clucked, annoyed that the wind had, for a moment, 

stolen the stage. 

“Li-Ming will be okay too,” she said. She spoke from a place she didn’t 

quite trust, but her words were there, nonetheless, puffs of smoke rising from 

a valley floor. This smoke, these words, hovered above us before being 

stamped out by the sound of revived cicada chorus. The drone rose, 

encouraging me to speak. What am I supposed to say? 

“Baba,” Lao K said, her eyes still fixed on the sky. 

“That’s my name,” I said. 

“She’s really going,” she said. She didn’t yet know the word for ‘die.’ Or to 

‘leave this world’, or any other idiomatic saying we used to mask the sting of 

death. For her, there were only a few assortments of verbs: ‘to go,’ ‘to be,’ 

‘to eat,’ ‘to study,’ ‘to make.’ Her lesson books hadn’t mentioned death 

yet—why would they? 

“Si,” I said, correcting her. “She’s really going to ‘si.’ Like the number 

‘four,’ but in the falling-rising tone.” 

死. To die. That body struggling beneath a flat, black surface, arm stretching 

upward. No one above reaching below, no one capable of saving that which 

was already lost. 

“I will never say that word, Ba,” Lao K said. “I like ‘to go’ better. It means 

there can be a return.” 

I sighed, placed my hand on my American daughter’s wide shoulder but this 

gesture didn’t have the resonance I’d hoped so I dropped my hand. 

“Where I live, there’s a wide beach without any houses, no people,” she said. 

“When I was a kid we’d go there at night to count the stars. Have you ever 

seen a star that falls?” I realized she meant a shooting star: liu xing. 

“Never in the city,” I said. “Only when I was a child in the countryside.” 

“That makes sense,” she said. “You need to be paying attention in order to 

see falling stars and no one is ever paying enough attention in the city.” 

45

“That’s true,” I said. I hated how she spoke as if she had the answer for 

everything, despite the fact I believed her, could have listened to her talking 

for days, even years. 

“Maybe if we wait, we’ll see one,” Lao K said, loosening her neck by rolling 

it side to side but not abandoning her gaze. 

“Maybe,” I said. “But what about Li-Ming?” 

“Maybe she’s looking too,” she said. “Maybe she sees them all the time.” 

“Did she tell you this?” I was suddenly jealous. 

Lao K shrugged. The cicada chorus died, briefly silent, before resuming its 

resonant hum and I knew now to expect a crescendo soon. 

“What did she tell you?” I asked again. 

“We never talk of stars,” she said, and although I didn’t believe her, I’d 

reached the end of my questioning. 

I tilted back my head and waited. We stayed like this for a while, all those 

stars staring back at us but unable to provide what we’d wanted. I thought of 

all the films I’d ever watched, the poetry books Li-Ming showed me that she 

brought home from Wangfujing, the characters in tight, meaningful rows. In 

every film, as in each poem, there was the belief in the impossible. At just 

this moment in a film or poem, the sky would burst with the most brilliant 

shooting star ever to race across the curve of earth, red-blue flame trailing 

behind. Lao K would point at it and I would follow her finger to its end, 

trusting it to lead me in the right direction. But we do not live in films or 

poems. Lao K and I did not see a shooting star, or anything as brilliant for 

that matter. We stood beneath the willow, peeking past its branches, hoping 

for several minutes the world would give us what we wanted. But what was 

that? I suppose I was always wanting to fill myself with something I felt was 

lacking, but despite the changes in scenery, the walk from the country to the 

city to the border to the city again, the grinding of lenses, the birth of a 

daughter, I hadn’t changed. It was as if my life were one long dead end, as if 

everything I’d ever hungered for was actually in vain—a bowl incapable of 

being filled, a burning star whose light would never reach us on earth. Did 

Lao K understand this? Is that why she reminded me to look upward, that 

there was something bigger than my tall, yet humble frame? 

46


As we walked home, I worried maybe we hadn’t been looking properly, but 

Lao K was already ahead of me, undeterred by this failed lesson in 

stargazing. She skipped toward the courtyard blocks, her wet hair trailing. 

“Lao K,” I called. “Maybe we didn’t look long enough.” 

She slipped around the last corner, her moonlit shadow reaching me then 

quickly snapping back, retreating farther away. 

“We looked long enough,” she said. “We can try again tomorrow.” Her 

words warped the corner, finding me in the distance, their echo between 

buildings unyielding. 

“Tomorrow,” I repeated. But I didn’t want to wait. Before entering our 

complex’s courtyard, I paused and tipped my head back to view the sky 

again. Thankfully, the stars were still there, still blinking at me from their 

various distances. I breathed deeply and waited, but still—nothing. It seemed 

the more I wanted, the less my life would reach its intended ending. 

But the longer I waited, contrarily, the less I believed this. The longer I 

waited, the longer the stars didn’t give me a shower of shooting stars, or 

even just one, the more patient I grew. I thought of myself as a boy in Cen 

Cang Yan who would sit by the river’s edge looking at the same stars. Not 

much had changed in the sky’s map since then, the same constellations 

shifting in the same patterns, the same planets rising from the horizon in the 

same seasons as the year before. I’d grown taller, lankier. I’d watched 

American fighter jets peel open the sky above Dandong, met a woman I 

loved more than I’d known possible, we’d made a child. All of this was the 

way one lived a life, in one version or another, but basically holding to the 

same premise. What did we expect to change when above us the sky’s 

tapestry remained essentially the same? Why, when everything around us in 

its simplest form—water, earth, sky, fire—was exactly as it had ever been 

since we’d known it, did we want something more? 

Lao K called for me, but I couldn’t find the words, the energy, to walk 

forward. I preferred remaining transfixed by the image of a world beyond 

this one that promised to always be here, always the same shapes and 

luminosities, despite the fact that somewhere these suns we called ‘stars’ had 

burned out, that we were only receiving their light millions of years after 

they’d died. I took comfort in this: even dead stars remain bright somewhere. 

Perhaps all that mattered was where we stood relative to them, that we 

believed their light meant something. 

47

I’d read a newspaper article many years earlier that said the biggest stars in 

the universe were the brightest, but these bright stars would also die out 

fastest, their own fiery energy consuming itself. The smaller the star, the 

longer its life, the lesser its burn. The journalist had quoted a Soviet 

astronaut who said, “No matter how far we reach into space, we’ll never get 

far enough,” and I thought it was strange that even Soviets didn’t know 

everything. They might have launched Sputnik, but they weren’t any closer 

at reaching the universe’s limits than the rest of us. 

Lao K yelled for me, this time followed by Li-Ming’s insistent voice. I 

lowered my head to my chest, but the image of the brightest stars still burned 

my retina, lingering for a few minutes longer until I rounded the corner and 

saw my American daughter and her Chinese mother, my wife, waiting for 

me in the doorway. 

“Carry me upstairs,” Li-Ming requested and although there was much more 

we needed to say, I gathered her body in my arms. I paused for a few breaths 

at the stairwell, readjusting my hold, worried suddenly by the lack of weight, 

how it was easier to lift her now than earlier that afternoon. 

“Hurry up,” Li-Ming said, as if she also sensed how much smaller she’d 

become, how now I was the one who had to carry us home. 

Raised in New England, Kaitlin Solimine has considered China a second home for 

almost two decades. She's been a Harvard-Yenching scholar, a Fulbright fellow, the 

Donald E. Axinn Scholar at Bread Loaf, and winner of the 2012 Dzanc 

Books/Disquiet International Literary Award. She wrote and edited Let's Go: China 

(St. Martin's Press) and her work has been featured in Guernica, Cha: An Asian 

Literary Journal, The Hairpin, and The World of Chinese Magazine. Her essays are 

forthcoming in anthologies published by Earnshaw Books and The Places We've 

Been. Find her at www.kaitlinsolimine.com. 

48


FEATURED ARTIST 


ARTIST STATEMENT 

As an artist, I believe that staying versatile, consistent, humble, & true to 

myself are the keys to success. With my work, I focus on many different 

approaches to gain attention from all types of audiences. Whether it may be 

nostalgia, color & contrast, mechanics, or just plain imagery, these are all 

ingredients I take into consideration while creating a piece or a body of 

work. I try not to focus on one style thus being versatile. It keeps my mind 

fresh and the work never gets boring. There’s always something for me to 

do. Sometimes I create for myself, sometimes I create for other people, and 

sometimes I just create because I can. 

49

Bomb the Morons 

50


Common Soul 

51

Into the Wild 

52


Old and New 

53

Runaway Train 

54


NUREN XIN HAIDI ZHEN: 

A WOMAN’S HEART IS A NEEDLE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA 

Karen An-hwei Lee 

We drop into this crevasse — 

Odd blue halls dragged smooth 

an underground glacier. 

by igneous stone: unseen shoulders of the world. 

We hear exhalations hyphens of blood and zeal 

where time is etched in limestone. 

A woman’s heart is a needle at the bottom of the sea. 

Far below the earth 

55 

Nuren xin haidi zhen. 

a girl crawls inside her own grief – rushed overflow of youth. 

How can you already know so much sorrow at this age, I wonder 

when she visits for prayer. Who abandoned you — what happened 

miles below the surface of your life? Did you come here to find safety 

and how may light enter in? 

The girl replies, my sorrow is not one of fashion or shame — 

in this underground chapel of melting ice. 

rather, the love I sought as a child eluded me

PAROUSIA I 

Karen An-Hwei Lee 

Red butterfly knots, macram : 

May I share what I see? 

Light years and local suns, 

truth or disaster in medias res. 

Nations spend more on perfume 

than famine, stone-ground 

until aroma emerges, hunger. 

Boys squat on stones, weep. 

Our universe is not infinite: 

boundaries exist. We await 

a translation as parousia 

wraps the sky around our heads, 

suede or new skin. The cosmos 

is fish paper and a house dress, 

insect’s eggs in my linen closet. 

Listen for stirring upstairs. 

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor 

(Tupelo Press, 2008), In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), and a chapbook, 

God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe Press, 2002). Her books have been 

honored by the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America 

(chosen by Cole Swensen) and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry (selected by 

Heather McHugh). The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she 

chairs the English department at a faith-based college in southern California, where 

she is also a novice harpist. 

56

PORTRAIT OF ANONYMITY 

Henry W. Leung 


My ex and her one-night love are drowning. 

They see my campfire’s beacon, the keyhole 

for the setting sun, and they re-emerge 

as Persephone did from Hades: bereft, delighted 

by that tempered, accidental bloom, desire. 

In his arms she flails and squeals— 

they approach me as one shadow united 

against itself, falling apart. Wet sand catches 

the imprint of their hard hips, their spent skin. 

They’re unaccustomed to this, this air’s 

gauze, this bandaging to earth; 

their wings have no room for waking. 

What did they see when they were down? 

The slippers of a tired God losing weight. 

A pillar in our bodies, folding the light. 

Dusk curls from their tide like dark pollen, 

so they suck the flesh from my steaks 

while they’re still hot. I roll the bones. 

57

QUARANTINE 

Henry W. Leung 

My feet pound perimeters 

into the earth, and I grow old 

while the long, imperceptible curve 

of the city cuts ahead of me 

like a ledge. In the last one 

billion years, the moon shrank 

a little. Pain travels through me 

at three hundred feet per second: 

missives from a toxic lover. 

My suitcase wheels clack over 

every square of sidewalk. 

Mountains heave up; I can walk 

over anything if I don’t stop. 

My lungs won’t fill with stems. 

During the Black Death, ships 

were kept apart in harbors 

for forty days, never more. 

Henry W. Leung is a Kundiman Fellow and the author of Paradise Hunger, 

which won the 2012 Swan Scythe Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. He is also 

a columnist for the Lantern Review, a Soros Fellow, and working toward 

completion of his MFA in Fiction at the University of Michigan. His work 

has appeared in such publications as Cerise Press, Memoir Journal, and 

ZYZZYVA. 

58

TREE RISINGS 

Purvi Shah 


In the secret garden, brushed behind city streets, you climb 

a short tree. I, in a catch-me-now skirt, float 

across branches, dangle uncut legs, reactivate 

muscles & silent bruises decades hushed. 

You inform me, with your four-year prowess, 

which branch is stable, which foot leads, which foot 

clasps. 

You convince me I have forgotten 

what it is to fall. 

At four or forty, a man carves space 

to temporarily hold, to grapple 

with which footing will reach first horizon. 

At four or nearer to forty, I gaze to the sun-burnt 

brush of grass & scatter of sharp stones & sigh – still rising 

as these bones blossom, – unshorn & more sturdy in view of break. 

Purvi Shah believes in the miracle of poetry and the beauty of change. Winner of the 

inaugural SONY South Asian Social Services Award in 2008 for her work fighting 

violence against women, she also directed Together We Are New York, a 

community-based poetry project to highlight the voices of Asian Americans during 

the 10th anniversary of 9/11. She writes to plumb migration and loss, including 

through her first book, Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Press, 2006), which was 

nominated for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award in 

2007. In 2010 she received a Travel & Study Grant from the Jerome Foundation to 

explore sound vibration and meaning in Sanskrit and how sound energy can translate 

through poetry in English. Her work has been published in numerous journals and 

anthologies including Descant, Drunken Boat, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indivisible, 

The Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, and Weber Studies. You 

can find more of her work at http://purvipoets.net, 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/purvi-shah, or @PurviPoets. 

59

THE TRANSFUSION OF YUKIYO KANAHASHI 

Jackson Bliss 

1. 

The English word dementia is derived from the Latin word demens, meaning 

“out of one’s mind.” Taken apart, demens is composed of two words: the 

prefix de, meaning “away, down” and the noun mens, the Latin word for 

“reason, mind, intellect.” This is the story of how language and memory fall 

apart but never disappear when you break everything down. 

2. 

In the final year of my sobo’s life, photography was an important motif of 

the beautiful dream and the fleeting world. My Japanese cousin, Eikichi, 

took several obligatory photos of my grandmother’s final trip at a Buddhist 

temple in Ōsaka. The photos are painful to look at because—with one 

exception where my grandmother is laughing a joyless laugh, her eyes 

closed—there’s no laughter in her face at all, no exuberant sparkle in the 

temples like before. They are exactly what I expect of Japanese family 

photos: people glued by tradition, cemented by hierarchy, weighed down by 

honor and gravitas. The photos are also powerful for the simpler reason that 

my sobo is barely there in the ukiyo (the floating world). Her face is 

supernaturally pallid like a poisoned moon, her lips are crushing the line 

between them. Her eyes are unsettled and overpowered by exhaustion. In at 

least two photographs, while my Aunt Shizuko looks straight at the camera 

(you), sobo is looking off into the distance as if she can’t bear to look you in 

the face. Maybe she didn’t know Eikichi was taking her picture. Maybe she 

stopped caring. In another photo, sobo looks incurably sad, the saddest, in 

fact, I’ve ever seen her in my entire life. Her eyes plead for more time. 

They mourn the inevitable great blur, speaking in the voice of loss. Her eyes 

are the orphans of the invisible war taking place inside her body. You are 

her witness now. You are her casualty. In another photograph, sobo’s 

mouth is half open, as if she’s groaning. If you look long enough you can 

see the emotion hemorrhaging inside, the quiet slowly bleeding out. The 

agony on her face isn’t just the pain of the body breaking down or the 

mutiny of her lungs. It’s also the pain of not knowing how to cover your 

pain anymore. The collapse of ganbaru, the Japanese verb of perseverance. 

When the pictures are put together, her face tells a story of suffering and 

exile: how she lost her country and family once she moved to America, how 

age and disease slowly pilfered her memories fifty-eight years after Japan 

60


surrendered on board the USS Missouri. Sobo looks like she keeps finding 

the same wound inside her, the same returning paradox. Despite her visit to 

Nippon and the surrounding ambient details of staccato Buddhist chants, 

ringing bells, long-winded Japanese honorifics, despite the lingering smells 

of kamaboko, senbei and overflowing good-luck incense in the background, 

she looks mortified. Her face is not a silent pain at all, it’s a grievance she 

shares with the viewer by accident, as if tripping and falling on your heart. 

This is the story of how the particles of my sobo’s soul were slowly 

dissolving into the atmospheric mesh threads around her like a bleeding 

silkscreen. 

3. 

It took most of my life to piece together her story, and even more time for 

the scraps to cohere, but one day I finally understood the truth about my 

sobo: part of her died when she left Japan as a young woman. During the 

American occupation, Japan nationalized its shame, handed over its army, 

and ignored the crimes against humanity it was both clearly a victim and also 

a perpetrator of. Meanwhile, a new constitution was translated from English 

to Japanese (making Japanese laws essentially foreign). Clean-cut GI’s 

became power brokers of a country they didn’t understand or love, after 

hundreds of thousands of civilians perished in the Tokyo firebombing (which 

my grandmother survived by jumping into the river and holding her breath). 

After America’s radiation experiment in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nippon 

lost its emperor, its national narrative, its urban landscape, its memory of the 

physical world. In that post-war chaos, my sobo was working in Yokohama 

as a seamstress when she met my grandfather, an American soldier who was 

a stubborn drunk, an amnesiac and a future sex offender. This is the story of 

how Japan lost the innocence it never had again and the story of how my 

grandfather died of cirrhosis of the liver at an American army base before I 

was born, killing himself before I’d have the chance to, a kamikaze without 

honor or sake. 

4. 

The word dementia is also a cognate to the Latin infinitive demēre, meaning 

“to take, cut away, withdraw, subtract or take away from.” Medically, 

dementia is considered a chronic cognitive disorder, often caused by injury 

or disease to the brain, resulting in severe or partial memory loss, mood 

swings, strong personality shifts and conflated recall (both sequentially, 

spatially and temporally). This is the story of sobo’s loss of reality, the 

abduction of her narrative arc by the serial killers of memory, all of them. 

61

5. 

Some people will accuse me of biographical revisionism, but I saw what I 

saw in Eikichi’s photos in much the same way that sobo knew what she 

knew when she looked away. In each photograph, my sobo is both present 

(as pain) and invisible (as joy), as if part of her is already taking a field trip 

to the spirit world. Soon after she returned to California, she began 

coughing inexplicably, even worse than before. This went on for days, then 

weeks, until the months stuck together like magnets. Slowly, sobo lost 

weight until she looked gaunt and bony. Her face turned sallow, her smile 

lines and crow’s feet cutting deep into her skin. Her appetite dwindled, 

satisfied by morning coffee, rice, a bowl of miso shiru and a miniature 

version of my mom’s dinner. Eventually, sobo saw the doctor and learned 

that she had stage-4 lung cancer. The doctor gave her the death sentence: 

two months, three at the most. I was in Portland, Oregon, walking to a 

restaurant when my mom told me grandmamma was going to die. I fell apart, 

my stitching became unstitched. I bawled in front of complete strangers on 

the sidewalk, a stranger to myself. After her death, I looked at sobo’s 

pictures of Ōsaka again and I felt haunted by her haunting, her spirit floating 

back and forth from her body. The light in her eyes in every photograph 

was fading, her energy weak and sluggish like a brownout in a once-dazzling 

city. Even during her last visit to Japan, you could see that cancer had taken 

over her radiant sparkle, her eyes now filled with the self-knowledge of the 

dying. This is the story of how prophecies sometimes work backwards, 

telling you what already happened. 

6. 

I didn’t know what I looking for and I was almost certain the search itself 

was dangerous, but I pushed forward at a slow, determined pace to piece 

together her life. I’d know what I was looking for once I’d found what I 

didn’t know. Once, I had a girlfriend in 8 th grade. She stood me up the day I 

was going to give her my Christmas gift—a teddy Bear in a fake fur coat, 

veil and satin bow. Her name was Lauren BearCall. That Christmas, after I 

told her my story about my flaky girlfriend who forgot to meet me on the last 

day of class before Christmas vacation, sobo just shook her head in 

disapproval. You were once in a relationship, I protested. No, she countered. 

She told me it was bad to have a girlfriend. It was better, she explained, to 

not be in a relationship at all. No hurt, she said. Better not to be in 

relationship, she explained. This is the story of a Japanese American woman 

hiding her past from her hapa grandson. 

62


7. 

Both etymologically and medically, dementia involves the loss of stuff. In 

most cases, it’s the loss of rational cognition, almost always including a 

nuanced definition of personality subtraction, the removal of some 

quintessential aspect of the self, much like an excision of the spirit. In other 

words, the person we know (or used to know) isn’t completely there 

anymore: she’s on a leave of absence, a cognitive exile. This is the story of 

how my grandmother inhabits two worlds at the same time, shuttling 

between the Church of the A-Bomb and the Island of Sakura, flashing 

between identities and continents in every complex chemical reaction in her 

brain, traveling in the space between neurotransmitters and the half-life of 

memory. 

8. 

Once my brother and I began taking over hospice duties for my grandmother, 

I started reading brochures for end of life care. In one brochure, it said that 

family members should show pictures of the dying person’s life to help her 

digest its richness. With the right reader, every life was a rich 

bildungsroman. I grabbed every musty, floral-themed album in my mom’s 

apartment in Leucadia, led sobo over to the couch by the hand and then sat 

down together with her. Photo by photo, page by page, album by album, I 

replayed her life back to her: Obāsama, this is you in Paris with mom and 

Dad. Oh, she said, surprised. This is you in London, I said. She nodded 

like London was playing hide-and-go-seek with her memory. Grandmamma, 

this is you in Hong Kong with mom, I said. She bent over the photograph, 

looking for faces she understood. This is you in Ōsaka, I said. Oh, Ōsaka, 

she repeated, like a word charm. This is you playing the piano at Mrs. 

Kurtz’s piano recital, I said. In three hours, we soared through her life at 

blinding speed, splicing a lifetime achievement montage that she soon forgot. 

Part of me was devastated: this was her life in snapshot, collapsing into 

snippets. She’d had a brutal life that got better over time, but now she didn’t 

even remember what she’d overcome (a sexually abusive husband, a world 

war, a broken-up Japanese family, an estranged daughter and the 

institutionalized xenophobia of small town America). She was the very 

definition of a survivor, and what’s worse, she no longer knew it. Still, 

another part of me was envious: sobo gets to relive each seminal moment of 

her life over again, for the first time, every joy is her first joy, every moment 

is an eternity. And all of the pain, suffering and grief she’d experienced 

since Japan became a radical experiment of radiation, democracy, cultural 

translation and historical erasure was wiped clean. This is the story of how 

63

Platonic knowledge is joyful recollection (because traces don’t disappear) 

and how memory loss is morphine and character assassination. 

9. 

After their mysterious marriage, my grandfather wanted his new Japanese 

wife and his hapa daughter to move to American as soon as possible. He 

didn’t want them to become Japs, even though both of them already were 

and he would never be. Nothing scared him more, in fact. Despite the fact 

that he was the foreigner and couldn’t understand my mom and my 

grandmother when they spoke to each other in nihongo, my grandfather 

banished them from their homeland, sending my mom and then later my 

sobo to a small town in Northern Michigan to rid them of their sickness 

called nihonjin no atashi (Japanese Me). This is the story of how an 

estranged gaijin in Japan (estranged from Yokohama, estranged from his 

own family in Washington state) turned his hapa daughter and Japanese wife 

into foreigners in America who would remain stuck in the spaces between 

cultures forever. 

10. 

Part of the cultural definition of dementia is predicated on the notion of an 

unchanging self. Americans, in particular, have a monolithic view of the 

human personality. We pretend that each person has a single overarching 

self that controls all ancillary traits and characteristics. When we deviate 

from this monolithic personality superimposed on us from the outside, we’re 

described as “fake,” “fronting,” “trying too hard,” “phony,” all words used to 

described people who aren’t “real.” Sociolinguistically, what is “real” has 

become synonymous with what is true, legitimate and authentic, which is 

odd considering that humans have never agreed on what reality is for the 

simple reason that reality is an interpretation of our subjectivity, so elusive, 

so protean and ontologically promiscuous, like a consort of false idols and 

imaginary worlds. The binary line separating reality and fantasy is a false 

one. But this is exactly how reality is supposed to be—impossible to locate, 

impossible to delimit. This is the story of how we oversimplify the war 

maps of the self in order to avoid the battlefield of identity, in order to not 

step on the landmines of contradiction. 

11. 

One of sobo’s last conscious projects was an album book of photographs 

she’d handpicked herself. Unlike the clean, well-divided and linear picture 

albums I’d shown her after reading a hospice pamphlet, my grandmother’s 

64


album book was a masterpiece of fragmentation. In it, she had rearranged 

pictures of her life that often went backwards and upwards chronologically, 

laterally instead of sequentially. Often the pictures followed a circular, often 

a dizzying trajectory that always returned to her (hapa) family and her trailer 

in Traverse City, Michigan and her (American) life as a seamstress for 

wealthy, conservative white women that smiled when she spoke because her 

accent overpowered her words like an angry dime store perfume. By 

looping through time and space, her picture narrative returned again and 

again to her (hapa) grandsons she used to chase around with a broom and 

prepare somen noodles for in the summertime and drive to Mrs. Kurtz’s 

house in suburbia for piano lessons and sit, often for hours inside her own 

trailer, smoking Pall Malls 100’s and listening as Mozart and Beethoven rose 

up from the altar on her piano, the notes spilling out the windows that were 

opened wide for all the neighbors to remember, witnesses to my halfbutchered 

sonatas, all of them. This is the story of how my grandmother 

resisted the cult of linearity by bending her memories into a continuous song. 

12. 

The day I realized my grandfather had raped my sobo was the day I realized 

I was capable of imagining terrible acts of violence. As a committed 

Buddhist, I’m ashamed by this confession but the burning rage remains 

inside me like mnemonic napalm. One day when we were eating TV dinners 

and watching TV, sobo told me: he made me do things I not want to do. 

While I can’t prove this, I have a feeling that what he forced her to do is 

what paper gods force ink mortals to do in Ovid’s metamorphoses. I have a 

hunch that this is how my mom was born, the reason my sobo married a 

drunk, stubborn American soldier who took away her childhood with a 

single act of infiltration. This is the story of how a woman married an 

atomic bomb to protect her family’s honor. 

13. 

In America, we treat dementia as an incomplete version of the former self, 

even when it’s a result of insufficient oxygen to the brain by metastasized 

lungs. We view it as raving, possibly schizophrenic (but absolutely lunatic) 

alternative identity that has hijacked the personality of someone we used to 

know. Dementia is always the enemy, not our cultural insistence that who 

we are doesn’t change through time. Dementia is metempsychosis, a change 

or shift in human souls from one body to another. But what if dementia 

isn’t the subtraction of the self but the self’s own multiplication? What if 

dementia is not the cognitive haunting of who we once were or the 

perversion of how people once knew us but our most emancipated version of 

65

our self, freed from the constraints of rationalism? What if sobo on her 

deathbed was not an abridged version of her former self but a completely 

unfiltered and unfettered version of who she’d always been inside? The 

Yukiyo Kanahashi I knew had a permanent accent and a shrunk-in-the-dryer 

vocabulary. She was unfaithful with definite articles. Sometimes, she 

stressed the wrong syllables of words, making them momentarily foreignsounding 

to native speakers. She also did other things with language that 

was unique: all dogs were doggies, my brother’s name became a swear word 

with a slight intonation shift, and sakura could be a holiday, a flower and a 

song. And yet, as much as I loved the English-speaking version of my sobo, 

that was just an excerpt of a larger body of work, a shrink-wrapped version 

of herself suffocating under a layer of cellophane. Her English was a 

performance. At times, almost a racist caricature of herself. Her Japanese, 

on the other hand, was the uncorking of the impossible bottle. When she 

spoke nihongo to her siblings on the phone every New Year’s day, our house 

became an opera house of repackaged stories, translated for our protection. 

This is the story of sobo’s dementia as both an act of defiance of western 

(linear) time and also an expansion (opera) of who she used to be before 

yellow people became lab rats for the Manhattan project. 

14. 

When my grandmamma moved to America, Japan froze in time. Her photo 

album of dementia was distinctly diachronic, looping continuously in a 

temporal helix that often crossed wires and became knotted, the form and 

content of her past changing with every frame, every row, every page, 

working out a new permutation of memory, each fresh (non-linear) narrative 

traveling back and forth, up and down, contracting and stretching. Sobo’s 

memories of Japan, on the other hand, were devoutly, distinctly synchronic. 

While her life in America continued to progress in the changing of 

presidents—Eisenhower-Kennedy-LBJ-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush- 

Clinton et al.—Japan was stuck in the Showa period for good, its doctrine of 

racial superiority and the sins of Nanking only recently erased by the blunt 

force of Enola Gay’s urban liquidation, the Battle of Midway and the 

occupation of the emperor’s throne by toe-headed hakujins that didn’t speak 

a word of nihongo, and didn’t know Shinto from shindo (the Japanese words 

for earthquake, depth, progress and elasticity). Was it her attachment to a 

lost childhood, the bloodshed and the amorality of war, the erasure of 

nationalist narratives of violence or simply the implosion of Hirohito’s 

personality cult that made my sobo cast such a sweeping spell on her 

homeland, the land of the sun-origin stuck in suspended animation, frozen at 

the exact place where civilian blood flowed profusely? This is the story of 

66


how Japan became a cryogenic prison of history (a tourniquet of melancholia) 

once my grandmother passed the international timeline. 

15. 

To me, my grandfather had always been a ghost, a toxic presence 

symbolizing a life vacated from within. But in fact, he was once all flesh 

and booze, moving from Pennsylvania military base to German military base 

like a picaresque war antihero. He was alive just long enough to earn a 

Purple Heart, become an alcoholic, create a family from mud and then 

abandon it once he became weary (sober). When I was an adult, my mom 

confessed to me that he had molested her too, usually when he was drunk 

enough to be a Molotov cocktail. For the second time in my life, I felt a hot 

anger rising inside of me like a projectile. This is the story of a war criminal 

decorated for his battle wounds, which resonated through every one of us 

after his fatal battle with the bottle. 

16. 

An implicit assumption in both the medical and the etymological definitions 

of dementia is this notion that what we lose was mnemonically worth 

keeping. But what if that’s wrong? What if selective memory is both a 

manifestation of trauma and pain, and also the psychic recreation of it, an 

emotional salve to the military science of trauma, a bandage for the teeth 

marks of history? What if dementia proves that the entangled strands of 

culture, narrative, psychology and memory, are actually knotted and tripletied? 

What if dementia proves that all human beings are actually 

multiplicities (mirrors) of themselves? This is the story of how delirium and 

conflation become a joint project of self-multiplication, especially when 

reality (promiscuous, subjective, impossible to locate reality) murders the 

songs of your childhood. 

17. 

Language is a blurry photograph: in grad school, my desire to learn 

Japanese was related to my desire to freeze American time and thaw 

Japanese time. Speaking nihongo was an ekphrastic gesture, my way of 

painting (resurrecting) Japan using unfaithful honorifics, crooked kana, giant 

kanji and broken copulas, a gift just for her on the phone. My secret hope 

was that Japan would thaw in her heart and stay frozen in mine. Speaking 

nihongo was my way of holding on to my sobo, the way I choose to 

remember our culture before the details became thin and too focused. This is 

67

the story of how I began studying Japanese both to connect with my 

grandmother and also bring Japan back from the graveyards of pop culture. 

18. 

When my brother and I got in a car accident in the family Subaru, I was in 

grade school, holding a children’s manga in my hand that my sobo had 

picked out for me a week before in Japan. Though I have a scar on my 

cheek and another one on my scalp to prove that crashes aren’t just the stuff 

of atomic bombs, I survived, the rest of my body unscathed. The doctor told 

my mom later that if I hadn’t been holding the manga in my hand (the thick, 

pulpy pages acting as protective spirits from land of the sun-origin), I might 

have died. Or been disfigured. That car accident proved that my monolithic 

self has never ceased being threatened since the day I realized I was a hapa 

performing a white person. This is the story of how Japan saved my life 

from narrative monomania or cultural duality. 

19. 

As a writer, language is how I slow down time and shed the words I’m ready 

to let go of. It’s also my project of memorialization. I write so that the 

reader is forced to do the remembering for me. After all, writing is aesthetic 

delirium, a diachronic synthaesia of person, language and event that infects 

the reader with narrative dementia, entrapping her within my own textual 

wonderland. I’m wandering, always wandering through the leviathan of 

small details, I’m exposed, already infected by the unstable neurotoxins of 

memory, sickened by the lyrical (cyclical) passages of this memoir. This is 

the story of how a writer (reader) leaps over the canyon of amnesia and finds 

his lost grandmother in the wasteland, hidden somewhere in the library 

stacks of his own memory where everything is waiting to be sewn into a 

coherent story that falls apart at the seams when you hold it up against the 

light. 

20. 

During the last year of her life, sobo recreated her own island of the sunorigin. 

She read tiny Japanese novels that she bought at the San Diego 

Kinokuniya, tucked inside the Mitsuwa supermarket on Kearny Mesa Road. 

My mom also got Nippon TV installed on their cable box so my 

grandmother could watch Japan in real time, leaping over fifty years of 

suspended animation with a push of a button. This is the story of how we 

create nations, mountains, and cities inside of ourselves that are not 

simulacra, but perfect imagined worlds, more perfect than the original design. 

68


Supposedly, the last sense to go is the hearing. On her deathbed, as her 

forehead was burning up, I crawled in my sobo’s bed. After thanking her 

again for her indomitable love, strength, generosity and devotion, I 

whispered one final thing in her ears: Obāsamawa, watashitachi no hikari 

desu. Grandmama, you are our light. You are our light. This is the story of 

how I tried to help my grandmother cross to the other side, a world I prayed 

was full of butchered Mozart Sonatas, Ōsaka festivals, the smell of 

kamaboko and senbei in the background and good luck-incense rising up, the 

tendrils of smoke painting sakura branches in the sky. 

When she died, my grandmother was completely out of her mind. Dementia, 

after all, is the travel between the self, beyond the self and around the self 

until there is no self left, or until there are too many selves to count. The day 

before I left California, I was sitting at a café with my brother, reflecting 

about my sobo, focusing all my attention on her as I opened up my portable 

Japanese-English dictionary which I’d brought to help me speak with her 

when her English collapsed into rubble. I had probably creased the page 

myself days before without knowing, pressing my hands firmly on the spine 

in case of emergency. Even so, these are the kanji I found on that page, just 

as I was thinking about her, just as I was replaying the last minutes of her 

life with me: hieru, meaning, “to grow cold,” higashi, the kanji for “east,” 

hikitoru, meaning “to take care,” hikō, the noun for “flight,” and most 

importantly, hikari, the kanji for “light.” This memoir is the story my sobo 

didn’t want to tell anyone, the story she kept telling me in excerpts of 

encoded trauma, the voyage I wish I could forget and the story I was 

destined to assemble and retell in a way that only I could, written in the 

lyrical (cyclical) style she would have forbidden and demanded of me. This 

is the story of my sobo’s deracination, her self-multiplication and also her 

return to the motherland. This is the story of my memory of her memory, 

transposed into a series of (im)perfect and flawed translations, a project of 

narrative multiplication, the lyrical disorder of a damaged (artistic) brain, 

and an honest arpeggio of memory. This is the story of how a memoir can 

also be a blood transfusion, giving sustenance to every version of her life she 

forgot and every version she left untold. 

69 

21. 

22.

Jackson Bliss earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame where he was the 

Fiction Fellow and the 2007 Sparks Prize Winner. Now, he is finishing his PhD in 

English and Creative at USC, working with TC Boyle, Viet Nguyen and Aimee 

Bender. Jackson has work published in the Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Fiction, 

Quarterly West, ZYZZYVA, Fiction International, Notre Dame Review, African 

American Review, Quarter After Eight, Connecticut Review, Stand (UK), and 3:am 

Magazine, among others 

70

CLUB GIGOLO 

Sean Labrador y Manzano 


Am I (are we) suddenly contracted when Beth swaps mint pushed from her 

mouth to my mouth like resuscitation suggests kinship can find a coherent 

space quietly tumbling gratitude perhaps ordering basket of chicken fried 

marinade of soy sauce and kalamansi and I play the magnanimous client 

replenishing San Miguel and patrolling the floor mamasans approve 

upselling and I am reminded of daughters smartly dressed selling jicama 

from rugged tables the perimeter of every town along the MacArthur 

Highway and fortunate buyers beware the father behind the acacia leaping to 

close a deal outside the matchmaker’s purview and my mother wants me to 

return to the States with bride who knows thirst and rural courtesies and the 

names of rice a daughter-in-law who distrusts bottled water labels a 

barangay pageant queen as congenial as my mother who draws strength from 

reciprocating pumps -We are cousins: Beth and I and no one else knows 

except the professor comparing certification and health care of sex workers 

in the free trade zone he negotiates mistresses at the other booth now that I 

have been assigned field study the other students finally abandoned for the 

roulette wheel’s immediate gratification - Who wants to track how far the 

hired help have travelled from farms like Easter penitents marching for 

terminal patrons to be crucified to learn supply and demand and job market 

oversaturation and how the Taiwanese mother-board plant’s refusal 

measures Rizal Avenue’s blocks of shame at every hotel, the valet pimps 

vocational school girl with technical tongue, extracting value of cheap candy 

- I did not expect to find Beth so soon but I chose my cousin for her legs I 

chose her legs before I learned they belong to the woman I am looking for 

the family hero I theorize to exist and I find her in the dressing room sitting 

on a stool by the bunk bed pushed to the wall leading to the window and the 

shanties slouching into Shit River and across the river, industrial park 

promises emerging from abandoned naval base her head turned away while 

the bright harem advertised themselves as themselves was I sold on her 

mature inattentiveness or quiescence? - Beth shares bounty of breast and 

skin the crows not chosen because of their legs I like mine carceral and 

netted and arabesque she offers a little meat finger to my mouth in steady 

unflinching rehearsed motion sailors have been fed this way and plant 

managers too I insist the carcass to the wind and clamor -Two girls, short 

and lack the illusion of height matched in one-shouldered shellacs dueling to 

Destiny Child’s “Survivor” facing the mirror wall, squatting to the beat, each 

holding an invisible torch thought I couldn’t you thought I couldn’t you 

thought I couldn’t you thought that I would but I am not attracted to 

recumbent shoulders perhaps the unapologetic Korean talent scout in three- 

71

piece suit nearest the air conditioner indifferent to statues and elusive 

beacons because this is the minor league and my own companion anticipates 

VISA to Italy and a salary remitted to parents raising grandson her continued 

tenure ligation makes possible - My mother is the youngest of eight in the 

archipelago there is not lack of barrenness in this business there are no babes 

- Gravidity is obsolescence - So we are watching the twin audition their legs 

like drumsticks I do not follow drumstick legs the disco ball mutes parody 

my rival smokes a thick cigar I can lose a bidding war of what is 

impregnable – 

and I look at the leg bones, defleshed. 

We tacitly agree to our uncanny pairing no economic forecast could 

predictonly in Olongapo where remanded to the system daughters not good 

for the soil or the laundry - I want the familiarity of her mouth again to 

expect her tongue I want to trace her legs as geometrically defined by nylon 

but when a guest relations officer is removed from the club she discards 

uniform and invisibly armored in designer blue jeans and simple blouse the 

transformer outside the hotel erupts in the storm in the blackout because no 

money exchanged we hold each other clothed instead I do not want to lose 

her again in the darkness I study her face her tattooed brow that draws me in 

to study her eyes the alluvial depositions of Zambal volcanic streams the 

cousin choosing to kneel beside me in the river? the American returned 

from several thousand miles to bury grandfather I was 10 years old meeting 

my supposed barkada in the shallows we received the cross on the forehead 

saliva of the dead. 

Sean Labrador y Manzano lives on the island off the coast of Oakland. He edits the 

anthology, Conversations at the Wartime Café. His chapbook, The Gulag 

Arkipelago is published by Tinfish. Recent writing appears in Aufgabe, Eleven 

Eleven, Generations, Conversations at a Wartime Café 

(http://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/sean-labrador-y-manzano), Fag/Hag, Volt, The 

Walrus, Tarpaulin Sky (http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/issue-17/index.html), The 

Poetry of Yoga, Poetic Labor Project (http://labday2010.blogspot.com/2011/10/seanlabrador-y-manzano.html) 

and else where. 

72


The Fight 


73

AUTHOR INTERVIEW WITH 

MONIQUE TRUONG 

Author of The Book of Salt (2003), 

Bitter in the Mouth (2010), and 

co-editor of Watermark: Vietnamese 

American Poetry & Prose (1998). 

74 

Photo by Marion Ettlinger 

By: Christine Lee Zilka and Sunny Woan 

One of the most illustrious writers of contemporary Vietnamese American 

literature, Monique Truong inspires with her characters and her quiet, 

intelligent prose. She is a former fiction editor of The Asian Pacific 

American Journal and co-editor of the highly acclaimed anthology 

Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose. Truong was born in 

Saigon and came to the States as a child in 1975. She attended Yale, then 

Columbia Law, and then in 2003 published her debut The Book of Salt, 

which won numerous awards. Then in 2010 she published her sophomore 

novel Bitter in the Mouth. 

Bitter follows a young woman Linda growing up in the 70s and 80s in Boiler 

Springs, a small North Carolina town. Linda experiences memory and words 

through taste, a condition known as synesthesia. The story is part coming of 

age and part tragedy as Linda explores her past and comes to revelations 

about her family and herself. 

Like Truong's first book, The Book of Salt, a fictionalized narrative about the 

Vietnamese in-house cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Bitter in 

the Mouth is centered around food and eating. In one of our most exquisite 

interviews to date, the editors of Kartika converse with Monique Truong 

about her books and her writing rituals. Her responses, her thoughtfulness, 

and the astonishing beauty of her words caused us to fall even deeper in love 

with her work.


KARTIKA REVIEW (KR): Food as theme? You have said in prior 

interviews that your books are not about food, and yet—yet they circle 

food and the sense of taste. How do you see them not about food? 

MONIQUE TRUONG (MT): As a writer, I'm interested in food and eating 

as performance, ritual, replacement, reward, punishment, pleasure, resistance, 

and as means of creativity and communication. Basically, everything but the 

food itself. If I write about a tree-ripened plum, its purple skin split by the 

sun, I don't do so in order to make the reader desire the plum itself but for 

what it represents within the narrative. (In life, for sure, I would desire the 

plum too. In literature, the plum is hopefully a bit more complicated than 

that.) 

KR: Writing another race is difficult—and in Book of Salt, you wrote 

another gender and sexuality. What challenges did you face writing a 

gay character? 

MT: My mantra while writing The Book of Salt: Love is love. Desire is 

desire. Sometimes the worst thing that we as writers and human beings can 

assume is that "other" people's love is qualitatively different from our own 

and thus unknowable or inscrutable. The circumstances and the expression 

of that love may be different, but the love itself is not. I felt that if I was true 

to this, then I would be able to create a character with emotional integrity 

and resonance no matter the gender, sexual orientation, or historical time 

period. 

KR: I have a confession—On a rainy afternoon while at Hedgebrook, I 

flipped through the journals of prior occupants of Oak cottage and 

discovered you’d stayed in the same cottage for your writing residency. I 

picked up Book of Salt and began reading, and came across a passage in 

which you described the rain falling on the roof—and the synchronicity 

between the rain falling on the roof of Oak cottage at Hedgebrook and 

the rain falling on the roof in Paris was undeniable. 

Some writers say they don’t write their physical setting into the novel— 

others say they have to travel far away to see the places in which they’ve 

lived. But there—there, I saw Hedgebrook, in real time. Did you write 

that passage while at Hedgebrook? To what extent does your physical 

setting seep into your writing? 

MT: I think you mean this passage: "I, like all my brothers, was conceived 

in a downpour. What else was there to do during the rainy season? Hell, I 

75

suspect everyone in Saigon was conceived to the sound of water, carousing 

on the rooftops, slinking down the drainpipes." 

I'm pretty certain that I wrote that during my first residency at Hedgebrook 

(for three months during the spring of 2000). I'm not sure how not to write 

my physical setting into my novels. The pervasive rain in Washington state 

was the rhythm to which I wrote many chapters of Salt, especially the ones 

about Binh's mother. 

That's another example of how my physical setting found its way into my 

narrative. Hedgebrook is a writing residency for women, and three months of 

talking primarily with women and hearing the stories of their lives and their 

mother's and grandmother's lives made me acutely attuned to the constraints 

and the acts of rebellion that were nonetheless possible for women 

throughout history. 

Of course, many of these acts of bravery and defiance were not on the public 

stage but within the domestic space. Binh's mother to me became one of 

these rebellious women. She was brave and defiant to have loved the 

schoolteacher. I'm not sure if I would have written her the same way if I had 

been writing elsewhere. 

KR: Alice B. Toklas’ cookbook was the inspiration for Book of Salt— 

what was the inspiration for Bitter in the Mouth? 

MT: I saw a segment about synesthesia, a neurological condition that causes 

the mixing of the senses, on a television show. There was an interview with a 

British man who experienced tastes when he heard or said certain words. 

That was the seed of Bitter for me. I knew that this condition would allow 

me to write about food and flavors again but from an unusual angle. 

KR: In Bitter in the Mouth, experience is expressed through the sense of 

taste. What is it about the sense of taste over the other physical senses 

(sight, touch, hearing, etc.) that seems to pull your writing toward it? 

Although for the protagonist of Bitter it is a health condition, for the 

reader it is a different perspective on story. What inspired you to tell 

that particular perspective of story? 

My sense of taste is my dominant sense. I favor it, and it favors me right 

back. I’ve an incredibly good memory for flavors and can combine them in 

my head and experience them in the abstract. I think many avid home cooks 

and chefs can do this too. My memories are also often accompanied by the 

clear tastes of the foods that I ate during these discreet moments in time. For 

76


example, I’ve a friend from college who introduced me to dry-cured olives. 

Whenever I think of her, I’m overwhelmed by the briny, faintly buttery 

flavor of those black olives and can see them sitting in a little dish on her 

table. 

Linda’s synesthesia is her secret sense. Secrets and hiding in plain sight are 

themes that are explored in many other ways in Bitter. But before all of those 

are revealed, I wanted to invite readers to identify with Linda. Yes, her 

condition is rare and unusual, but I do think it’s easy or tempting to imagine 

that we can understand it. The flavors that she experiences when she hears or 

speaks certain words are those of the American dinner table in the mid 1970s 

and onward. Many of these flavors are courtesy of processed, canned, and 

mass-marketed foods. These flavors, in reality, are common denominators. 

Linda, though, is not common. She is rare. By Chapter 2, she already has 

provided readers with one of the keys to the novel: “I could claim, for 

example, that my first memory was the taste of an unripe banana, and many 

in the world would nod their heads, familiar with this unpleasantness. But we 

all haven’t tasted the same unripe fruit. In order to feel not so alone in the 

world, we blur the lines of our subjective memories, and we say to one 

another, “I know exactly what you mean!” 

KR: One incidental theme in Bitter in the Mouth is the tension between 

truth and story (for example, the grandmother), objective history versus 

subjective. You have mentioned in prior interviews that all history (and 

the law as well) is story. Do you think that’s one of the rationales for 

choosing first person point of view in both Book of Salt and Bitter in the 

Mouth, your notion of the objective existing only in the subjective story? 

MT: I’m a firm believer that how a person tells her story is as revealing as 

the story itself. The first-person voice is, for me, the best way to explore all 

the how’s. What Linda tells you first about herself and what she withholds 

until later, for instance. 

I also prefer the first-person voice because it allows me to inhabit a 

character-specific vocabulary and relationship to language, which are other 

manifestation of subjectivity. A character can attach a unusual meaning to a 

commonly used word, twisting it slightly or entirely, and it’s up to me to 

reveal to the reader the idiosyncrasies and what they may mean. 

77

KR: What is the physical act of writing like for you? 

MT: I wrote both my novels at many different residencies and also in my 

writing room in Brooklyn. Wherever I am, I place my desk right next to a 

window. On the desk, I set up a simple visual tableau related to the story that 

I'm working on. A set of tiny silver-plated salt and pepper shakers for The 

Book of Salt. A ceramic ashtray in the shape of North Carolina for Bitter in 

the Mouth. 

Sometimes, I'm convinced that I have to be wearing shoes or I can't write. I 

try not to write while wearing my PJs and never just my underwear (sorry, 

over sharing). This is all certainly related to my need to escape the house or 

building (and my manuscript) in an emergency. I'm not joking. Feeling in 

control and prepared is necessary for my process, especially since what's 

happening on the page/screen is so often the opposite of that. 

I believe strongly in the ritual as opposed to the routine of writing. Ritual 

and routine are not the same. 

Ritual (a long walk beforehand, a cup of roasted rice tea during, an salutary 

nod to my literary heroes, Gertrude Stein and Marguerite Yourcenar, whose 

works in various forms occupy a place of honor on my writing desk right 

now) is about the physical, intellectual and emotional transition that needs to 

take place before I can shed my day-to-day self and become my writing self. 

Routine is the numbing repetition of an act: laptop, daily word count, and 

deadlines. 

KR: Stories versus novels: with which do you feel more comfortable, 

and why? 

MT: I love the short story, but I haven't written a short story in decades. In 

my novels, I’m always hoping to achieve the emotional economy, tautness of 

language, and gestural symbolism that are present in the best of them. 

KR: In what way/s has your law background informed your fiction? 

MT: The law taught me precision. Find and use the word that means exactly 

what you want to convey. Do not compromise or there will be ugly 

consequences. 

78


KR: What advice do you have for beginning or emerging writers? 

MT: I recommend that they travel, not just while they are emerging but 

during the whole of their writerly lives. I also recommend that they take off 

their headphones or ear buds when on the subway, bus, train, etc. In other 

words, eavesdrop. Everyday people say amazing and odd things. The other 

day I walked by a group of older African American men on Sixth Avenue, 

and one of them was adamantly repeating this phrase several times: “God 

and Hilary Clinton…” I should have stopped and listened to the denouement, 

but I was in a hurry. 

That too: Don’t be in a hurry. You end up missing things. 

79

CONTRIBUTOR BIOS 

FICTION 

Sharon Hashimoto teaches at Highline Community College in Des Moines, 

Washington. Her short stories have appeared in North American Review, 

Crab Orchard Review, Tampa Review, Shenandoah, THEMA and others. 

Her book of poetry is The Crane Wife, co-winner of the Nicholas Roerich 

Prize and published by Story Line Press in 2003. She received a NEA 

creative writing fellowship for poetry in 1989. 

Anu Kandikuppa is an economist and a candidate in the MFA Program for 

Writers at Warren Wilson College, North Carolina. She lives in Boston with 

her family and is online at www.anukandikuppa.com. 

Wah-Ming Chang has received fellowships for fiction from the New York 

Foundation for the Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Urban 

Artist Initiative, and the Bronx Writers' Center. Her fiction has appeared in 

Mississippi Review and Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, 

nonfiction in Words without Borders and the Asian American Writers' 

Workshop's Open City, and photography in Drunken Boat and Open City. 

She is currently working on a photo essay about the essence of the dance 

rehearsal. 

Raised in New England, Kaitlin Solimine has considered China a second 

home for almost two decades. She's been a Harvard-Yenching scholar, a 

Fulbright fellow, the Donald E. Axinn Scholar at Bread Loaf, and winner of 

the 2012 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International Literary Award. She wrote and 

edited Let's Go: China (St. Martin's Press) and her work has been featured in 

Guernica, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Hairpin, and The World of 

Chinese Magazine. Her essays are forthcoming in anthologies published by 

Earnshaw Books and The Places We've Been. Find her at 

www.kaitlinsolimine.com. 

POETRY 

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), 

Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), and a 

chapbook, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe Press, 2002). Her 

books have been honored by the Norma Farber First Book Award from the 

Poetry Society of America (chosen by Cole Swensen) and the Kathryn A. 

Morton Prize for Poetry (selected by Heather McHugh). The recipient of a 

80


National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she chairs the English department at 

a faith-based college in southern California, where she is also a novice 

harpist. 

Henry W. Leung is a Kundiman Fellow and the author of Paradise Hunger, 

which won the 2012 Swan Scythe Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. He is also 

a columnist for the Lantern Review, a Soros Fellow, and working toward 

completion of his MFA in Fiction at the University of Michigan. His work 

has appeared in such publications as Cerise Press, Memoir Journal, and 

ZYZZYVA. 

Purvi Shah believes in the miracle of poetry and the beauty of change. 

Winner of the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Services Award in 2008 

for her work fighting violence against women, she also directed Together 

We Are New York, a community-based poetry project to highlight the voices 

of Asian Americans during the 10th anniversary of 9/11. She writes to plumb 

migration and loss, including through her first book, Terrain Tracks (New 

Rivers Press, 2006), which was nominated for the Asian American Writers’ 

Workshop Members’ Choice Award in 2007. In 2010 she received a Travel 

& Study Grant from the Jerome Foundation to explore sound vibration and 

meaning in Sanskrit and how sound energy can translate through poetry in 

English. Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies 

including Descant, Drunken Boat, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indivisible, The 

Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, and Weber Studies. 

You can find more of her work at http://purvipoets.net, 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/purvi-shah, or @PurviPoets. 

NONFICTION 

Jackson Bliss earned his MFA from the University of Notre Dame where he was the 

Fiction Fellow and the 2007 Sparks Prize Winner. Now, he is finishing his PhD in 

English and Creative at USC, working with TC Boyle, Viet Nguyen and Aimee 

Bender. Jackson has work published in the Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Fiction, 

Quarterly West, ZYZZYVA, Fiction International, Notre Dame Review, African 

American Review, Quarter After Eight, Connecticut Review, Stand (UK), and 3:am 

Magazine, among others. 

Sean Labrador y Manzano lives on the island off the coast of Oakland. He edits the 

anthology, Conversations at the Wartime Café. His chapbook, The Gulag 

Arkipelago is published by Tinfish. Recent writing appears in Aufgabe, Eleven 

Eleven, Generations, Conversations at a Wartime Café 

(http://www.mcsweeneys.net/authors/sean-labrador-y-manzano), Fag/Hag, Volt, The 

Walrus, Tarpaulin Sky (http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/issue-17/index.html), The 

Poetry of Yoga, Poetic Labor Project (http://labday2010.blogspot.com/2011/10/seanlabrador-y-manzano.html) 

and elsewhere. 

81

ART 

82 

What The 


Jordan Josafat was born in Vallejo, California just outside of San Francisco and was 

raised in the south bay of San Diego, predominately Imperial Beach. Growing up in 

the South Bay, Josafat was exposed to graffiti, poverty, lowrider cars, and the surf 

culture all in one, which gave him an advantage at an early age to learn to accept 

people & places for what they are and to never judge. Josafat has been here all his life 

but in 2006 moved back to San Francisco for a year to pursue an artist internship & to 

gain inspiration to add to Josafat’s artist weaponry. Now back in San Diego, Jordan 

Josafat is constantly creating work doing commissions and being highly involved 

with solo & group art shows.

Managing Editor, Sunny Woan 


EDITOR BIOS 

Sunny Woan likes to dote on cats. She has a difficult time maintaining thermal 

homeostasis. Her creative works have appeared in Fifth Wednesday Journal, Blue 

Earth Review, Houston Literary Review, and SoMa Literary Review, among others; 

and legal research in Washington & Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice 

Law; Temple Journal of Science, Technology and Environmental Law, Cal. Western 

Law Review, Santa Clara Law Review and have been anthologized in casebooks. By 

day, Sunny works as general counsel for a global investments firm. By night (and by 

way of weekends and holidays), she is a fashion designer and has launched her own 

label, Taryn Zhang, a line of briefcases and handbags for working women. 

Fiction Editor, Christine Lee Zilka 

Christine Lee Zilka has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such 

as ZYZZYVA, Verbsap, Yomimono, and Men Undressed: Women Authors Write About 

Male Sexual Experience. An adjunct instructor at a local college, she received an 

Ardella Mills Fiction Prize from Mills College in 2005, placed as a finalist in Poets 

and Writers Magazine’s Writers Exchange Contest in 2007, and received an 

honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open in 2009. Christine earned her 

undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Creative Writing from 

Mills College. In addition to writing short stories, she has a novel in progress and 

writes at the Writers Room in New York City. 

Poetry Editor, Eugenia Leigh 

Eugenia Leigh is the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 

2014), which was a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of 

Younger Poets. She is a Kundiman fellow, and her poems and essays have appeared 

in several publications including North American Review, The Collagist, PANK 

Magazine and the Best New Poets anthology. A recipient of multiple Pushcart 

nominations and poetry awards from Rattle and Poets & Writers Magazine, Eugenia 

received her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, through which she taught 

writing workshops for high school students and incarcerated youths. Born in Chicago 

and raised in southern California, Eugenia currently lives in New York City, where 

she believes in miracles. 

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Nonfiction Editor, Jennifer Derilo 

Jennifer Derilo received her MFA (creative nonfiction emphasis) from Mills College, 

where she was its first Jacob K. Javits scholar. She teaches creative writing and 

English at Southwestern College. While she blogs for the mAss Kickers Foundation, 

a cancer advocacy and support group, she enjoys reading (and writing) about people 

and things unseen. She often has nightmares about zombies. And abandoned 

predicate parts. 

Contributing Editor, Paul Lai 

Paul Lai hopes one day to live in a library. He is pursuing an MLIS degree at St. 

Catherine University. Previously, he has studied and taught at Yale University, UC 

Berkeley, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University, and the University of St. Thomas. He 

has co-edited scholarly journal issues about Asian American fiction and alternative 

contact between peoples in the Americas. He frequently presents essays on Asian 

American literature at academic conferences where he has the opportunity to meet 

other scholars and writers. His publications include reviews of books about Asian 

American literature as well as academic essays on notable Asian North American 

writers. He is on the executive committees of the Circle of Asian American Literary 

Studies and the Modern Language Association's Asian American Literature 

Division. Paul lives with his partner and their crazy dog Giles in Minnesota, and he is 

working on a collection of horror short stories, all featuring dogs. 

ADVISORY BOARD 

Elmaz Abinader Gus Lee 

Justin Chin Li-Young Lee 

Peter Ho Davies Min Jin Lee 

Jessica Hagedorn Ed Lin 

Randa Jarrar Nami Mun 

Gish Jen Fae Myenne Ng 

Elaine H. Kim Lac Su 

Maxine Hong Kingston Bryan Thao Worra 

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SUBMISSION GUIDELINES 

The editorial board reviews submissions on a rolling basis. Thus, we accept 

submissions by electronic mail year-round. Please do not send previously published 

work. We accept simultaneous submissions, but ask that you notify the respective 

editor immediately when your submission has been accepted elsewhere. 

Submit online with the submishmash submissions manager: 

http://kartikareview.submishmash.com/Submit 

Fiction | Attn: Christine Lee Zilka 

Short stories, novel excerpts, experimental or interpretive works of fiction, flash 

fiction and micro-fiction pieces fall under our category of fiction. You do not have to 

be of APIA descent, but we ask that if work is either written by APIA writers or the 

content of your work be APIA-related; in no way do we require APIA writers only 

write APIA themes or characters. We give due consideration to all submissions 

written, but we prefer work under 5,000 words. Please send us your best work. 

Poetry | Attn: Eugenia Leigh 

Narrative, experimental, lyrical or prose poetry, free verse, eastern or western poetic 

forms, and works meant as spoken word are all welcome as poetry. We give due 

consideration to all submissions, but we strongly prefer poems under 100 lines and 

would like to receive 4-6 pieces per submission. Please send us your best crafted 

poems. 

Nonfiction | Attn: Jennifer Derilo 

For creative nonfiction, we are particularly interested in works (memoir, reportage, 

letters, essay, etc.) that touch on themes including--but not limited to--identity, 

memory, family, culture, history, trauma, dislocation. Alternative formats and 

subject matter are nonetheless welcome. We give due consideration to all 

submissions, but we strongly prefer works under 7,500 words. 

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Kartika Review is a national Asian American literary arts journal that publishes 

fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, author interviews, and art/photography. The 

journal launched in 2007 and as of 2011, is fiscally sponsored as a 501(c)(3) by the 

Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center in San Francisco. 

OUR NAMESAKE 

In Vajrayana (or Tibetan) Buddhist tradition, the kartika, a crescent-shaped knife, 

symbolizes the cutting away of ignorance and superficiality, with the hopes that it 

will lead to enlightenment. The kartika is kept close during deep meditation or prayer. 

It serves mainly as a metaphorical reminder of our self-determined life missions and 

never is it actually wielded in the offensive against others. We took on this namesake 

because the kartika best represents this journal’s vision. 

CONTACT 

Kartika Review 

API Cultural Center 

934 Brannan Street 

San Francisco, CA 94103 

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