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If your image of Tibet is one of praying, peace-loving monks, here’s your cure.

Be ready for ruthless Kekexili.

The kiss of the ocean

Umi, the kiss of the ocean

by Julie O’Yang
**Short sotry first published in Japan Anthology, Pirene’s Fountain, Chicago, 2011. See cover below.

His name was Kawa, meaning river.
Today Kawa gave a party to celebrate his 9th birthday. It was not the kind of party he had expected, since everyone told him 9 is a cool number. But his grandfather did come when others had left. Grandpa brought him a very special present.

‘I found it in the Pacific when I went out fishing one summer night last year. I have kept it for this occasion,’ Grandpa said, showing him something he held out in his fisherman’s palm.
‘What is it, Ojiisan?’ Kawa cried out, his eyes glued to the object of almost unbearable brightness, which seems to rouse from an infinite slumber as he touched it. Dazed, Kawa felt a shudder through his entire body.
‘Are you going to take it or not?’ Grandpa urged. ‘Has your mother already told you 9 is the number of forever, kyu? When she gave birth to you, you were so little, we didn’t think you would make it. I guess it’s our genes. I came six weeks too early, on New Year’s eve. My mother believed it was her fish soup I couldn’t wait to taste! You collect them, don’t you, boy. Well, add this one to your treasure trunk. Go on, don’t be shy. It’s a magic charm of unimaginable power. Wait and see,’ a smile flickered on the fisherman’s face.
‘The boy doesn’t collect marbles anymore,’ his mother interposed. ‘Kawa-san is a pianist now, giving his first solo concert soon!’
‘But yeah, of course. I almost forgot to thank you for the invitation, Kawa-san! Believe me, this is not a marble, this is a star fallen into the ocean from the sky!’
‘Whoa!’ Kawa let go a small sound. He nipped the bright sphere between his gingerly fingers. It was only a tad bigger than a marble, with convincing weight. He felt convinced by Grandpa’s words, because when he played Debussy, his favourite composer, his hands moving on the keys, he had the feeling he was touching the stars in the sky, ebony and ivory stars. He was guided into the realm of forever!
He peered again into the depth of the shining in his hand. A sudden storm of nausea hit upon him, as if the ground had suddenly turned liquid ebbing away under their feet.
‘Are you all right, Kawa?’ his mother flashed him a worried look, reaching out one hand to feel the pale face covered with a thin film of sweat. ‘You haven’t caught a cold, have you? This weather is treacherous.’
It had been hellishly hot the past few days, it was not even spring yet.
Kawa pushed his mother away. ‘I’m OK. Grandpa, tell me how you found it…the Pacific, you said?’
‘I have dived for conch shells my whole life,’ Grandpa answered, detouring, the way old people talk. ‘We fishers believe every shell holds a dream of the ocean, a memory. What do you think, Kawa, am I a dream diver or a memory keeper?’
‘What kind of memory, Grandpa?’
‘Shells are like fossils. Every loop, every mark and hole can tell what has happened in the past. People, mythology and ships; earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunami…’
‘What is tsunami?’
‘How many times do I have to tell you, my boy? When the tsunami hits, it’s impossible to imagine what that is like,’ the fisher raised his eyes high to look in the air, his clear voice clouded in awe. ‘Your grandma used to work as a nurse in a sanctuary a long time ago. She told me when a patient got unmanageable, they’d always try the art therapy. They give the patient paper and crayons and tell him to draw the Big Washing. Because tsunami is something beyond a sane man’s comprehension – you won’t forget what I told you last time, eh? When the ocean starts to disappear?’
‘Drop everything and run.’
‘Even when you are kissing a girl on the moon-lit beach, drag her up a hill first thing. Now, you were asking where I found it, Umi?’
‘Umi is her name?’ Umi,the ocean.
Kawa didn’t know why he said “her”, it just felt right for him. Tempted to steal glances, not quite knowing what to expect, he discerned, to his amazement, that inside the blinding brilliance it had slowly turned a cobalt blue. Mini tidal waves multiplied from its core to the edge, fading and starting all over again. Celestial sea.
‘I told you it has magic, now you believe me!’ Grandpa said, winking. ‘I found it on the day of Tanabata. As usual, I went out to the water to talk to your grandma.’
Tanabata is an ancient tradition. On the 7th day of the 7th month, the two lovers, Vega and Altair, two stars who are in love but separated by the Milky Way are reunited for one night, on the heavenly bridge made by magpies lining up in endless rows. That was the story at least. On this day swarms of birds would be found flying in one direction to finally disappear behind the horizon. Some regarded it as an auspicious sight, a fabulous sight as it is; others found it gloomy, like a Delphic oracle, always a bag full of surprises. Come what may, Tanabata is the traditional Valentine’s Day. Grandpa and Grandma met each other during the festive occasion long ago. Even after she died, Grandpa celebrated Tanabata, alone. He would sail out in his little fishing boat to somewhere on the open sea. Kawa’s mother had tried to convince the stubborn man that he was too old for this kind of adventure, but without much success.
‘I prepared my boat in the early evening,’ Grandpa continued. ‘I had cleaned it, it SHONE like a spring blossom. I packed a little jar of wine with me and some sweet seafood, ready to fight the sea monsters – that’s why your Grandma fell in love with me, she always said I looked like Moby Dick when we first met.’The old man chuckled, baring his unflawed teeth.
‘Now you ask,’ he paused to think for a moment . ‘I think it was Umi that found me instead of the other way around – ’
‘How?’
‘I heard it. It called me.’
‘You mean Umi spoke to you?’
‘Didn’t you know, my little pianist? The sea is absolute music. You can never get tired of sea like you never of love. Flute for cooing conversation: you are seducing the girl, you make her believe you will rip out your heart this instant to feed her, and she
threatens she will eat it out your hand right away! Piccolo, oboes, clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, trumpet, cornets, trombone, tuba, cymbal, triangle, shrieking strings…The lovers are going through every stage of love making just like going through life – you give everything. His gossamer stroke in her hair, her translucent kiss on his throat…every gesture, every minimal movement a worthy, exciting quest. Finally the two of them have toiled enough, then comes the bass drum. Thunders bring along the ultimate question: What is this? Will it last?’
Kawa was surprised to know that Grandpa was an expert. He had just named almost every orchestral component of Debussy, La mer.
His mother laughed. ‘It must be the sake that made you talk this way. You found the answer to your BIG question, father?’
‘I thought I was drunk too. But the answer was illuminated from below, a frothy yellow and pink light like a shattered neon. At first I believed it was a giant shell, you know, the ones that give light in the dark. I quickly stepped out of my clothes and jumped into water to find out. Then I saw it, suspended in midair, a calmness absorbing all the chaos in itself in order to give birth to…a kiss.’
‘A kiss?’
‘Katsushika Hokusai? He depicted true love’s first kiss in that famous print of his, Tsunami. This is how I found it. I named it “umi no fukami”,depths of the sea. When I held Umi in my hand, I didn’t know why, but I was crying. Keep it. She is yours.’

After the concert, Kawa and his mother boarded the train back home. The route was Kawa’s favourite, with the bullet train curving along the east coast, hugging the green and grey cliff at the back, the Pacific a stone’s throw away, white chains of wave crashing without ever being exhausted. He loved the unhelpful passion, wild, wasted.
‘Let’s visit the temple, shall we?’ His mother suddenly decided that she wanted to stop at the large Buddhist temple complex she had once been to as a child. ‘It’s a lovely town with inns and hot springs. Buy some mochi cakes while you wait for me outside.’
‘But I don’t like mochi, you know that, Okaasan,’ Kawa complained. He didn’t like sweets, neither did he temples. But he understood his mother. She wanted to pray for Grandpa who passed away one week ago.
‘The pink cakes here are delicious. Next month, in the hanabi season, they will be selling them in piles. All fancy tastes cut into flower shapes, offer food for cherry blossom goddesses and sea demons.’ His mother made a ridiculous face to cheer him up.
‘Wait for me at the tree, I won’t be long,’ she instructed as the train came to a halt.

Kawa sat down under the large Zelkova tree facing the ocean. He didn’t know the Pacific could be calm despite its name. He ate the rice cake with gusto. He didn’t have lunch; before the concert he was too nervous to think food. Munching, Kawa felt sad. Grandpa would be proud of him if he had heard him playing Debussy. ‘Kawa-san you are a genius,’ he would have said, ‘writing a symphonic poem, dancing on stars of ebony and ivory.’ His mother had had his ash spread out over the ocean from his fishing boat, Moby Dick went back where he belonged.
He put the rest of the rice cake aside and took out his talisman. Held against the sun, in the peculiar translucency a shadow curved like a rainbow. He thought of Grandpa.
‘The vision stone is a point in space that contains all other points,’ he had told Kawa. ‘Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe. Umi will give you the answer you look for!’
‘But I’m not looking for an answer. I’m looking for a question!’ Kawa whispered, holding the brilliant star to his eyes. The rainbow pulsed inside, filled with shots of orange floods. Glowing intensely, suddenly, it split into a loop hole, bleeding. The dream of last
night rushed back to him, in accurate, heartfelt details. The bright, liquefied silhouette touched his face and called his name, Kawa, my river. Is she the tooth fairy his mother talked about? He had never met her before but it was as if he had known her his entire life – the life before this life.

A hundred yards away the ocean retreated without Kawa’s noticing. When it came back again, Kawa raised his eyes to the sky smashed to smithereens, wiped out. A lazuline, abysmal blue wall rose to ink black, liquid flames, foaming, ear-splitting rage, gashed open by its own, unknown strength. True love’s first kiss. From the bowels of the earth came a ferocious, unruly, unreasonable music. Kawa dropped the stone in his hand. He saw the gazelle eyes he remembered from his dream, dark, pure tiger green…
Say Sea, Take Me! I’m Kawa…He muttered. The ocean didn’t wait for the feeble, puny little spot to finish his sentence. It’s that kiss…the one you lose yourself in.

Made in China: “Contemporary Chinese literature should have the self-confidence to forget what it is and where it came from.” Julie O’Yang, novelist

*In memoriam of the May 4th Movement*

May Fourth Movement, intellectual revolution and sociopolitical reform movement that occurred in China in 1917–21. The movement was directed toward national independence, emancipation of the individual, and rebuilding society and culture.

In 1915, in the face of Japanese encroachment on China, young intellectuals, inspired by “New Youth” (Xinqingnian), a monthly magazine edited by the iconoclastic intellectual revolutionary Chen Duxiu, began agitating for the reform and strengthening of Chinese society. As part of this New Culture Movement, they attacked traditional Confucian ideas and exalted Western ideas, Mr. Sci(ence) and Mr. De(mocracy). The movement also marked the birth of the Chinese Communist Party.

Chen Duxiu: the founding father of New Culture Movement/May 4th Movement. May 4th served as turning point in China; it was a seminal event that radicalised Chinese intellectual thought. Their “new thought” and “new literature” would inspire and dominate the intellectual revolution and sociopolitical reform for decades to come.

*

Newspaper ads from the New Era

XiN magazine gerecenseerd door NRC Handelsblad | XiN magazine reviewed by the Netherlands’ daily evening newspaper NRC

“Ook Hollandse lezers kunnen wat opsteken in het nieuwe blad XiN, voor de Chinese diaspora” Janna Laeven wrote in the Netherlands’ daily evening newspaper NRC. Below is a PDF file of the NRC media section, for a good impression:

XiN magazine: click en read me

*

>>>Wiki has one English page about NRC Handelsblad, just for curiosity’s sake:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRC_Handelsblad

//

Julie O’Yang | Editor-in-Chief

XiN Media
Badhuisweg 74
2587 CL The Hague
The Netherlands
XiN: You know China from here! www.xinmagazine.nl

Hierarchy, 5 bucks, Novel = New: the imperative to newness, and most of all, very, very long: what is a Novel and its future(s)?

Smita Singh: “A page turner. A must read for all.” Read Smita’s full book review

Butterfly by Julie O’Yang, a book review by Smita Singh

{Smita Singh is the Chairperson and Treasurer of Vaani. She initiated the movement called Vaani, a platform for Asian women writers to meet, to exchange, to share ideas. She writes short stories, novels and blogs like mad! At the moment she teaches post graduate class in one of the colleges in London.}

*

I met Julie O’Yang, author of  Butterfly in Oct 2011. She had flown in from Netherlands to take part in the South Asian literature festival in London. I was pleasantly surprised by her unassuming and modest yet very confident attitude.

 Julie has published fiction and articles in various publications worldwide. Apart from being an author Julie is also a visual artist and Butterfly has some of her own illustrations in it.

The book cover shows a vague woman’s face underwater, a very artistic choice in keeping with the story.

Butterfly is a love story that spans life and death, magic and reality and parallel reality.

The author has woven mythology and history skilfully together to create a mysterious atmosphere in the story that keeps readers hooked till the end.

The butterfly motto has been used repeatedly to create and reinforce the idea that like a butterfly changes its form and gets reborn time and again, so does love in-spite of all the odds against it be it war, Nanking Massacre, or the darkest secret.

“They say butterfly fish was made by Bodhisattva Guan Yin after she had a strange dream. Guan Yin looked at the star-studded body hauling a fantail so black like ink spilled in water. At that moment a butterfly floated past her. One thing other fish don’t do, though. A real butterfly fish can change into a beautiful woman at night.”

The love scenes are infused with Chinese myths and strong imagery that gives it a mystical tinge.

“I decided to love him. I decided I would accept him for everything he was. I learned to forgive and how to forgive. The world happens, we can choose how much it happens. At the end of the day no-one loses or wins. There is no future living in the past. For all I know, we could start finding peace and happiness between two human beings. To love, to be loved is the true gift of our heart. Love is not mediocre. Love is our freedom.”

“You were pregnant by a man-killer, didn’t that bother you?”

The book is littered with metaphors and beautiful imagery that spell binds its readers and gives them wings to take them along on an unpredictable, conflicting journey of a butterfly.

I found it hard to put it down until the very end although the end itself is a bit lacking in clarity may be done so  intentionally by the author to maintain the aura of mystery.

The book Butterfly all in all reads like a Bestseller and the readers will find it a page turner. A must read for all.

Here is the original link of the review on Vaani London: http://www.vaani.org/2013/04/butterfly-by-julie-oyang-book-review.html

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I  hope everyone that is reading me is having a really good day.

Whining tragedy may be accepted as poetry, when the solution is simple, it’s because creativity is the only thing that makes sense.

>>>“A discipline for reengaging with a world we take too much for granted”>>>

Poets and Capitalism

By Micah Mattix

(The following was first published in The American Spectator)

What is it with poets and capitalism? The two, it seems, are like oil and water.

At the end of last year, Alice Oswaldand John Kinsella withdrew their respective books from consideration for the T.S. Eliot Prize because the £15,000 award was being underwritten by Aurum Fund Management. Oswald suggested that it is unethical for a literary prize to be sponsored by an investment firm that manages hedge funds. As an “anti-capitalist,” he stated, “Aurum does not sit with my personal politics and ethics.”

This is not an isolated instance. From writing against“Reaganomics” to supporting the Occupy Wall Street protests, contemporary poets seem generally predisposed against capitalism. What’s going on here?

In The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Harvard, 2011), Christopher Nealon explains that many 20th century poets — particularly American — have spoken out against capitalism because of their fear that capitalism causes cultural homogeneity and political and economic turmoil. Nealon’s understanding of changes in the American economy in the second half of the 20th century is overly ideological, but he is right that the poetry of this period was (and continues to be) preoccupied with capitalism.

No doubt many poets believe that capitalism leads to both homogeneity and instability, and the best among them subtly critique the consumerism and excess that one finds in all affluent societies, America in particular. Wendell Berry’s agrarianism and Philip Levine’s “portraits” of the working class suggest that we have lost something of the relational aspect of work. This critique of capitalism — or the excesses of industrialization — is worth hearing, whether or not one agrees that capitalism itself is to blame. It is constructive, free of shrill, and generous.

But there are two further responses to capitalism in contemporary poetry that are less constructive and effective, both of which are rooted in the idea that capitalism has spoiled poetry’s audience by encouraging the objectification of all things, including people and works of art.

One of those responses has been for poets to create poems that rail against hierarchy and morality in an effort to free their audience from the shackles of the great capitalistic machine. The form of these poems is usually highly experimental, using repetition and fragmentation, along with taboo subject matter, to supposedly create a poem that both resists commodification and shocks the middle-class into seeing that property ownership, marital fidelity, proper grammar, and so forth are all constructs that restrict personal and, importantly for poets, aesthetic freedom.

Allen Ginsberg’s famous long poem, “Howl,” is a case in point. In the poem, Ginsberg laments the destruction of the “best minds of our generation” by “Moloch.” In his own annotation in the poem, Ginsberg defines Moloch as “the Cannaanite fire god, whose worship was marked by parents’ burning their children as proprietary sacrifice.” The use of absurd images and obscenity is intended to shock Ginsberg’s audience into seeing the oppression all around them. He explained to William F. Buckley in a 1968 interview when he was asked not to use any “dirty words” on the show why such a request presents a “moral problem”:

            “There’s a political function to the language of everyday use. The language we actually speak to each other off the air. There’s a communication that’s involved, and there a classical use of all sorts of what we call “off color” words in art, as well as images. So our problem here, or what I’ve been proposed with, is having in a sense to censor my thought patterns.”

For Ginsberg it is the poet’s duty to break such censorship.

If Ginsberg’s poetry, while often obscene, is rarely if ever vitriolic, later poets have unfortunately supplied more than enough. Much of Amiri Baraka’s later work is one long tirade against Jews, and June Jordan and Haunani-Kay Trask’s work is little more than a rant against whatever (and whomever) they think are the tools of a fictional, but nevertheless oppressive, God. These condescendingly mock or berate the middle-class rather than free them. And since few people willingly expose themselves to derision, it is no surprise that these volumes are met with general disinterest, which, for certain poets, is only further proof of the slavery or the simple-minded boorishness of the middle-class.

A second response has been for poets to no longer write for a general audience but for their fellow poets and kindred spirits alone. Paul Goodman was the first to suggest this in his 1951 article “Advance-Guard Writing.” The problem for the avant-garde writer, Goodman states, is that he has internalized societal conflict and re-presented it in his work, which is rejected by his audience and sanctioned. The communal aspect of art has been broken, and what Goodman proposes is that poets stop writing for a general audience and re-establish a “plausible” audience of peers.

The so-called “New York School” of poets — John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch — followed this advice, at least in part. While O’Hara in particular established a community of readers through his use of names and personal anecdotes that lack sufficient context in the poems for comprehension, later poets have turned to the jargon of critical theory as a shared vocabulary, which, combined with the great number of poetry books published today in order to fuel burgeoning MFA programs, has made contemporary poetry a coterie art.

So we have two responses to what poets perceive to be capitalism’s destruction of the poet’s relationship to his audience that add to, or in some instances completely accomplish, that destruction. It is an extraordinary example of wish fulfillment.

Is the secret hope of poets that capitalism will fall and a new order will rise in which they are valued? Czeslaw Milosz points out in The Captive Mind, which was first published 59 years ago, that this was the proposal offered to artists in Poland and other (now formerly) Eastern Bloc countries in return for their support of the Kremlin.

“The intellectual’s eyes twinkle,” Milosz writes, “with delight at the persecution of the bourgeoisie, and of the bourgeois mentality. It is a rich reward for the degradation he felt when he had to be part of the middle class, and when there seemed to be no way out of the cycle of birth and death…Yet he is warm-hearted and good; he is a friend of mankind. Not mankind as it is, but as it should be.”

While the poet later suffers because he realizes that this new order imposes painful aesthetic constraints, “the recompense for all pain is the certainty that one belongs to the new and conquering world, even though it is not nearly so comfortable and joyous a world as its propaganda would have one think.”

Some American poets may nourish exactly this hope, but I doubt most harbor such catastrophic dreams of the end of the current economic order. The fact is capitalism coupled with democracy, despite all the problems and potential pitfalls, offers the poet a greater opportunity to practice his craft to connect with his audience than most political systems of the past, and most poets recognize this. But in order for this connection to happen, poets must write for their audience rather than merelyagainst them, connecting in love, not self-serving egotism.

John Burnside, this year’s winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, which was announced last month, reminds us of the importance of a poetry that engages the world (and its readers):

“[P]oetry is important because it makes us think, it opens us up to wonder and the sometimes astonishing possibilities of language. It is, in its subtle yet powerful way, a discipline for reengaging with a world we take too much for granted.”

 poetry that engages the world