AlliterAsian (20 page)

He reached out to a book at random and tried to take it off the
shelf. The book came out about two-thirds of the way and then abruptly jammed.

Wu pulled harder, to no effect. He grabbed the book with both hands and yanked with all his strength.

The entire bookshelf began to fall towards him.

Wu let go of the book and stepped back. The bookshelf was still falling.

Walking backwards, he tried to quicken his pace. He looked up and saw that the bookshelf appeared to be of infinite height, stretching upwards without end. There was nothing he could do to avoid getting crushed.

The bookshelf came down.

There was a scream.

Wu woke with a start. The scream had not been his.

Beside the smouldering remnants of the fire, Vancott was locked in a desperate struggle with a monster. His attacker had pinned him to the ground. Vancott squirmed, kicked, and punched, frantically trying to free himself. The Jiangshi was as emaciated as the boys, but he was taller and armed with two lethal weapons—madness and a knife.

Wu was frozen in momentary fear. He tried to yell, but no words came.

The Jiangshi brought the knife down—once, twice—

Before there was a third stroke, Wu sprang forth and launched himself at the monster. He ran into the Jiangshi's back and pounded the smelly, sore-ridden flesh with both fists. The Jiangshi grunted and took a swing, sending Wu sprawling to the ground.

Lying on his back, Wu looked up at the looming monster's gnarled, weathered face with its long, filthy tangled hair, twitching unfocused eyes, and rotting yellow-brown teeth. Wu backed away on his elbows like a crab.

He hit something on the ground.

The Jiangshi raised his knife to strike.

Wu grabbed the rectangular object and brought it up with both hands. The knife plunged into the book, piercing it from cover to cover, its point protruding out the back.

Grunting, the Jiangshi twisted and pulled on the knife, finally extracting it from the book but stumbling backwards a few steps.

Wu threw the damaged book at the Jiangshi, hitting the monster on the side of the head. Already off balance, the Jiangshi fell onto his haunches. It didn't take long for the monster to get up again, but the delay gave Wu just enough time to load his slingshot and fire.

The mote scored a direct hit into the Jiangshi's left eye.

Screaming and clutching the bleeding eye with both hands, the Jiangshi dropped to the ground. The monster rolled side to side, shrieking and twitching uncontrollably as blood and vitreous fluid oozed between his fingers.

Wu got up and walked over to where Vancott's lifeless body lay in a pool of his own blood. Vancott was on his back, mouth and eyes still wide open. In silence, Wu simply stared at his dead companion with a lack of emotion that would have shocked his pre-Fall ancestors. He left Vancott where he lay, picked up the book, and simply walked away.

Behind him, the Jiangshi's screams went on and on, the cries of a wounded animal. Wu kept walking, book in hand, until he could not hear the inhuman noises anymore.

“I am sorry about your friend,” FénshÅ« said when Wu finished his story.

Wu said nothing more.

“You are a brave young man,” she continued, “and extremely lucky as well. We are the first expedition to work in the Vancouver ruins for years, and it is only possible because we were able to afford the armed guards to protect us from the Jiangshis.” She put the book on the ground. “Did you see anything else down in that … um, ‘skeptic' tank?”

The boy fell unhelpfully silent, once again.

A young woman entered the tent, carrying a small bundle of clothes.

FénshÅ« pointed. “Wu, please go with my colleague. She will give you some food. You need to rest, and when you are better, we will need you to take us back to this place you found. Do you understand?”

Wu nodded.

“Gēn wǒ lái,” the young woman said, taking Wu's hand and leading him out of the tent.

Fénshū waited a moment, then picked up the book and took it outside. Near the centre of the expedition encampment, a small fire burned. She walked towards the campfire, and without a second thought, casually tossed the book into the flames.

The plastic wrap melted quickly, evaporating like water on a hotplate. Then the flames attacked the book itself, consuming it from the outside edges in. The words on the cover—A Novel,
Oryx and Crake
, Margaret Atwood—were legible for a few moments until the dust jacket blackened and crumbled away. Acrid smoke billowed briefly when the white residue ignited, causing Fénshū to cough and blink. The spine was the last to endure, but eventually it, too, yielded to the flames.

When the book had been reduced to ash, Fénshū returned to the tent and settled back in her chair. Pre-Fall Běiměizhōu texts were of academic interest and had some nominal value on the antiquities
market, but her backers in Běijīng and Clavius had little interest in them. Excavating the Vancouver II site was a costly and very risky venture. Her expedition would need to find something of much greater value, and soon. The boy would take them back to the other site. For her sake—and to some degree, the boy's—she truly hoped that artifacts of real value were still out there, somewhere in the ruins of the old shit and piss.

       
A
UTHOR
C
OMMENTARY

The central idea in “TúshÅ«guăn” of someone trying to preserve books before the fall of civilization by storing them in an underground septic tank, was taken from
Lucifer's Hammer
, a post-apocalyptic novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, in which someone in the Los Angeles area does exactly that just before a comet hits the Earth. I moved the action two thousand kilometres north and introduced the Chinese archaeological team excavating the ruins of Vancouver as a parable of Western fears about the re-emergence of China. My main character was named for Louis Wu, the protagonist in the
Ringworld
series of books, also written by Larry Niven (whose middle name is van Cott). Some of the imagery of the post-apocalyptic world was inspired by the nonfiction book
The World Without Us
, by Alan Weisman. As part of my research, I tried to burn an old book and was relieved to discover that it is actually more difficult than one might think. For the record, I thoroughly enjoyed
Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood and, in fact, my story has a few homages to the novel which I challenge readers to find. —
Eric Choi, 2015

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Eric Choi is a Hong Kong-born writer, editor, and aerospace engineer living in Toronto. His Asimov Award-winning novelette “Dedication” appeared in Japanese translation in
The Astronaut
from Wyoming and Other Stories
(Hayakawa, 2010), edited by Toru Nakamura. With Derwin Mak, he co-edited the Aurora Award-winning anthology
The Dragon and the Stars
(DAW Books, 2010), the first collection of speculative fiction by authors of the Chinese diaspora. He is also the co-editor, with Ben Bova, of the new science fiction anthology
Carbide Tipped Pens
(Tor Books, 2014).

Poetry

Souvankham Thammavongsa

Ricepaper
8, no. 2 (2003)

A FIREFLY

    
A firefly

    
casts its body

                        
into the night

                                       
arguing

                                       
against darkness and its taking

                        
It is a small argument

                                       
lending itself to silence,

                                 
a small argument

                                       
the sun would never come to hear

    
Darkness, unable to hold itself

                                 
against such tiny

                                                    
elegant speeches,

                        
opens its palm

                                                
to set free a fire

                                                                
its body could not put down

       
Reprinted with permission from
Small Arguments
by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Pedlar Press, 2003
).

       
A
BOUT THE
P
OET

Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of three poetry collections:
Small Arguments
(2003),
Found
(2007), and
Light
(2013), which won a Trillium Book Award for Poetry.

Fred Wah

Ricepaper
18, no. 4 (2014)

SITKUM

By-and-by

but behind

now awake

I was younger

Before noon

I was younger

but a small half

a mind brown

In the afternoon

by dinnertime

I would dream

of other ways

Day was a hurdle

seemed elliptical

fifty cents

through the air

Half as much

time became a bit

an outlet of use

future fractional

Mid sentence

stop at the spades

think aging

these roots, rapids.

       
“Sitkum” is Chinook jargon for “half” or “half-way.” For more on Chinook, including a full lexicon of words, see the
Ricepaper
17.3–4 article on the subject.

JAN 1/2013

    
clouds of my mind

    
hybrid, increase

    
as I reach for the choices

    
grain or reptile

    
between standing

    
or moving

    
government platform

    
I want in house

    
no dumb science that

    
is that their power

    
those clouds that come

    
from secrecy only

    
abhorrent cover story

    
another radio contest

    
the architecture

    
of office buildings

    
I will remember this

    
this, in the year of water

LIGHTNING

    
Are we in the air yet?

    
Is this the bridge, this tree

    
no deeper than dirt

    
our obligations to symmetry

    
burnt through

    
an underground sky

    
synapse to heaven ahead

    
thunder and shrapnel

    
just memory.

                              
Home

    
no neutral land

    
the target confident

    
-headlamps flicker

    
and the pulaskis are dull-

    
this carpet of one to another

    
settles into moving night

    
and flickers back at us

    
in a dance through the smoke

    
we are in the middle of our ladder

    
going up.

       
A
BOUT THE
P
OET

Fred Wah has published and edited a wide range of poetry and poetics since the early 1960s. His biofiction,
Diamond Grill
, is a well-known text on hybridity, echoed in an online poem at
highmuckamuck.ca
. Recent books include
Sentenced to Light, is a door
, and
The False Laws of Narrative
. He has recently co-edited (with Amy De'Ath)
Toward.Some.Air
., a collection of statements on poetics. In 2013, Wah was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada and completed his term as Canada's fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureate.
Scree: The Collected Earlier Poems, 1962–1991
will be published in the fall of 2015.

Kathryn Gwun-Yeen Lennon

Ricepaper
18, no. 4 (2014)

SOMEDAY I WILL

       
A
BOUT THE
P
OET

Kathryn Gwun-Yeen Lennon
is a poet and urban planner. Of Cantonese and Irish ancestry, she was born and raised in Edmonton on weekend dim sum, river valley bike rides, and Chinatown haircuts. She was a member of Edmonton's 2012 Slam Poetry Team and the Victoria Spoken Word Festival's all-star ensemble. Her work has appeared in
Ricepaper, Alternatives Journal
, and the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. She was a contributing artist to the exhibition
M'Goi/Do Jeh: Sites, Rites and Gratitude
at Centre A (the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art).