I hopped aboard, sat down on one of the seats. Rush hour had passed and it was almost empty. I watched the trains, each one a moving billboard selling commercialized happiness. On the seat next to mine, there was a worn-down book with a cheap ebony cover, blisters over the corners, withered edges yellowed by soda and time. The train came to a stop, several students in dark blue and white uniforms sauntering in. I picked the book up, curious about its contents, and flipped through the first few pages.
There were random writings from random people, every page different. One was a love letter to a butterfly. Another had instructions on how to cut up a chicken using sugar crystals to make chicken wings sweet. There was a disturbing page with only one sentence: I caught HIV from a hooker. Another had a ripped image of a male covered in pink lipstick. There were advertisements for porn, night clubs, restaurants, and Internet services. Religious creeds and declarations from different sects were interspersed throughout, written in a variety of different languages. I flipped through a hundred pages, read directions to treasures of the senses and secret confessions from tortured expatriates who felt there was no such thing as home. Lovers wondered about the horoscopes of their companions; the blind complained about songs that described color; a woman wondered if dreams could be exploited to make money.
At the end, I came across this on a small slip of paper:
BANGKOK, THAILAND — I was going to kill myself when I realized I hadn’t figured out the meaning of life. I thought I might as well give it a go, see if I could find something to keep me going. So here’s me asking you, what’s the meaning of life? One page to share whatever you want. Fill it out, pass it on to someone else, or leave it behind. I’ll find it when it’s all done.
An empty page lay beneath it.
I stared, wondering, is this for real? And if so, what to write? I thought of my life back in the States, a march to the invisible wavelengths of ritual. I’d escaped to China because I couldn’t stand the ineptitude of my passions. I lived for the boss who had a boss who had another boss who had yet another boss no one knew, and who was really just a metaphor for power, or money, whichever was the ultimate goal.
It was like the allegory of the fly that jumped off a skyscraper and only used his wings at the last second, every shard reflected in a billion reckless lenses. I wanted to die so I could live and live so I could die. I drifted on a soulless pilgrimage through the countries of Asia, exchanging new beliefs for my armory of old ones. I remembered hearing an old uncle describe how he lost everything during the Cultural Revolution and another distant relative bless it as the time he became affluent, bowing to the harlot of circumstance.
I thought about the depressing emptiness of stale success and the meanderings of fulfilled longing that had no real pattern and left me wondering, What next? Do I just continue on the same road, repeating again x 1,000? I hated that prospect. Buddha was 29, the same age as me, when he gave up everything to meditate under a tree. If I tried to meditate under a tree, I’d be arrested for loitering (or trespassing) and locked up in a prison with murderers and rapists. Bangkok was so confusing to me. A poor city with so many religious citizens who tried to constantly cheat you to chase after illusions; the taxi drivers with their dark tans and shifty eyes. I thought of the emaciated child who shared his coconut with a dog, the young woman holding a baby while carrying the groceries for an old woman. I thought about the twenty workers I saw squeezing into a pickup to try to feed their family on pennies. I wanted to reorganize my mitochondria and dendrite connections in a viral community that wanted to ravage it, everyone around me coughing mucus and spitting skewers from the charred grills on the street. Nothing made sense. Not the city, not its people, not even myself.
I took out a pen, started scrawling my thoughts down: BANGKOK, THAILAND — I was a bacterium spliced into a…
Author Acknowledgments
In the writing of any book, particularly a short story collection, there are the people behind the story. I owe a big thanks to the wonderful editors who published my individual short stories; Daniel Casebeer at Pear Noir!; Laura Cogan and Howard Junker at ZYZZYVA; M.E. Parker, Tim Horvath, Shane Oshetski, and Meredith Doench at Camera Obscura Journal; John Gosslee at Fjords Review; Deborah Kim and Jennifer Luebbers at Indiana Review; Paul B. Roth at Bitter Oleander; Dr. Richard Peabody and Nita Congress at Gargoyle; Saul Lemerond at Sheepshead Review; Christine Lee Zilka and Sunny Woan at Kartika Review; Michael Potter at ESC!; Jonathan Jay Holley at Johnny America; Jason Jordan at decomP; Christine Stoddard at Quail Bell; Kevin O’Cuinn at Word Riot; John Berbrich at Barbaric Yawp;and Brandon Barnes at Mayo Review. Every one of these editors helped make these stories what they are and if I described all they did, that would be another volume in itself.
Special thanks has to go to my friends who I continually asked to read, edit, and re-read my stories. They were the ones who kept me going when the writing ran thin. In alphabetical order: Andrew Anderson, Bill Storkson, Daniel L., Diane Yim, Edward McAvoy, Erika Choung, Esther Yim, Geoff, Daniel, and Jana Hemphill, James Chiang, Jenny Huang, Jill and Joy Fan, Joe Dilallo and Rachel Ruderman, John Han, Keridan Elliot, Kiyomi Mizukami, Linda Young, Matt K., Michelle Barton, Mollie Boero, Neej Gore, Ofer E., Paula Tudorof, Rudy Astudillo, Steve, Yuhon Ng, and God.
I wanted to thank a few writer friends for inspiring me and challenging me. All of them are super gifted and I’m humbled by their support and their willingness to push me to be a better writer. These include E. Ragus, G. Hom, Joseph Michael Owens, Kristine Ong Muslim, Leonore Wilson, Leza Lowitz, Margaret Weis, Maria Montoro, Rio Liang, and Rosebud Ben-Oni.
Of course, no book would be complete without an amazing editor at the helm, and the staff at Signal 8 Press have been amazing. A big thanks to Cherry Lam, Justin Kowalczuk, Justin Nicholes, Shannon Young, and Marshall Moore.
Finally, I have to acknowledge my wife, Angela Binxin Xu, to whom this book is dedicated. Every one of the stories in this collection has been touched or influenced by her in some way.