Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

I’m not one of those progressives who have become deeply disillusioned with Obama, but that’s because I never shared that sense of gleeful hope. I could point to policy positions to explain why, but the truth is, as I wrote then, that I didn’t vote for Barack Obama, but I was glad he won; it was, after all, a relief to see the Republicans out of the White House. I might well have followed the same emotional arc so many did if I had not experienced that same arc seven years ago over the space of less than a week.

It seems strange now to say that I had hope when the war in Iraq began, maybe even self-indulgent, but I had been to so many massive marches and rallies against the impending invasion that I believed there was enough anger in the US to force a real and dramatic change to the structures of power through direct action. I believed this at the candlelight vigil on the night the war was announced, and I believed it the next day when I showed up at 7 am to meet other people who were ready to put their bodies on the line to stand for peace. I believed it when the police charged our human barricade at the Federal Building. I believed it when I was arrested there, and I believed it through the weekend when people were still in the streets and when every time I entered my building on Market I passed people in costumes or with signs heading to a different rally. I even believed it when, after the 72-hour limit during which I wouldn’t be given a cite-out if rearrested, I joined a group of protesters trying to block the Federal Building, though we didn’t have the numbers for our actions to be anything but symbolic. But it turned out that after a few days during which civil disobedience disrupted San Francisco, the protests waned; nothing ultimately changed, other than there being more police helicopters hovering over my apartment.

So when Obama won, I wasn’t able to feel the same unguarded joy that led so many to dance in the streets. I can’t believe in change being made in one dramatic move.

The US is still in Iraq. Soldiers are being withdrawn from there only so that more may be sent to Afghanistan.

But this doesn’t make me wiser than those who can hope without bounds. That feeling, too, can help bring about the gradual shifts that make life a little easier for the oppressed and that maybe one day will add up to more.

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Grown Up, or, Not a Revelation since Nothing Changed

blue house
gray house
synthesized
barn house

six-year old,
thinking there’s
nothing, to protest,
other than a changed
schedule on Saturday
morning TV:

she did march at home
round and round her
parents’ parking spot

San Francisco,
decades later
(almost two)
she marches
yes but also sits
arrested for blocking
Federal property
cited out:
War (Iraq, Afghanistan)
never ends.

---

written in response to: read write prompt 113: the therapeutic cleanse — a spa for your writerly being, by mary biddinger with the following changes to my recent style: no physical gaps within lines, more punctuation (in an earlier draft this was even truer, but I couldn’t stand it), closer attention to the location of the emphasized syllables, starting in a setting I haven’t used for years (Coburg, Oregon), and trying to tell a story a bit more than I usually set out to do.

At the end of this week, I’m moving over 200 miles away from my partner. A visit to see him will require taking a plane—or a train and a ferry. Neither of us can wait for the change. We will be living 4400 miles closer together.

I met Martyn, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hull, two summers ago in Liverpool at an academic conference on vampire fiction. At the time, I was on break from teaching English at Shengda College of Zhengzhou University in a rural part of Henan Province. A mugging in Cambodia the following summer would send me back to my hometown of Seattle where I decided to stay for a year to pursue my writing while teaching at an ESL school as a substitute. Throughout all this, we stayed in close touch online, occasionally using the telephone or seeing each other in person, growing closer all the time.

It could be said that we started out remarkably close. At some point during the post-conference gathering in The Everyman pub, our fellow attendees began to think we had met each other before; whether our conversation or our placing our hands on top of each other’s gave that impression is difficult to say.

What is certain is that all of that almost never happened. We began to talk in earnest only after Martyn asked to buy me a drink. That may seem unremarkable, but as a woman with Aspergers and all the difficulties with social niceties that come with it, I always find receiving such gifts uncomfortable, as I never know exactly what is expected from me in return. A friend of Martyn’s with whom he had co-presented that day, however, informed me that this was simply his way: he liked to buy drinks for everyone and would not be happy until I accepted.

“In that case, I’ll have whatever you recommend,” I told Martyn.

And so over pints of SA Brains, a malty best bitter from Cardiff, our bond began to form. We left together and, after some difficulty finding a taxi, went back to my hostel room, even though it meant sneaking him past the front desk. Neither of us had never done anything like that before.

The next day, however, I had to catch a ferry to Dublin (by way of the Isle of Man) where I had already reserved lodging and transportation for a trip exploring the homeland of my mother’s side of the family. We exchanged email addresses and kissed each other goodbye in a black cab. During my travels in Ireland, Martyn emailed me several times, and I emailed him back whenever I had Internet access.

When I got back to China, where I had Internet access in my apartment, the emails became generally more frequent (though we did go through a few slow patches), and we began to chat on Googletalk when our time zones and schedules allowed. Along the way, we discovered a remarkable number of overlaps. Besides the vampires, we share an interest in experimental writing and Jacobean drama. He too has Aspergian tendencies. A few years before we met, we passed through JFK within half an hour of each other, albeit it at different terminals; if I had taken the subway instead of a taxi, we might well have seen each other on the platform, but I had way too much baggage to navigate those trains. Eventually, we changed our changed our Facebook relationship statuses to “It’s Complicated”. (His suggestion, though sending the email that contained the idea terrified him.)

About a year after we met, I planned a trip to Southeast Asia for my summer break. I flew first to Shenzhen where I stayed overnight before flying to Kuala Lumpur. I explored that city’s towers, mosques, and parks for a week before flying out to Siem Reap. There, I spent another week climbing through the ruins of Angkor, followed by a week exploring Phnom Penh before heading to the beachside town of Sihanoukville. I planned to remain there for a few weeks to write, but my trip was cut short when I was robbed at knifepoint on one of the most popular beaches in the area.

Because my passport was in the stolen bag, I would have to go back to Phnom Penh and the American Embassy to get a replacement. Fortunately, I had money and credit cards that I had kept separately, but I still had to get a police report before I left town. In the stress of all this, it was Martyn I relied on. I not only emailed him but also paid a few dollars to call him from an Internet cafe after he gave me his cell number and told me to call him any time. Just the sound of his voice helped me calm down.

When I got to Phnom Penh, however, things turned out not to be as simple as I had hoped. I had a photocopy of my passport, so getting a new one wasn’t a problem. Unfortunately, when I went to the Chinese Embassy to try to get a new work visa, I was told that I would have to return to the U.S. to apply for a new visa even though I had a photocopy of my stolen work permit. In the past, other teachers had been able to obtain work visas in Hong Kong or elsewhere, but this was 2008. The Olympics had brought with them a stricter set of regulations: visas could only be applied for in your country of origin. It would have been impossible for me to fly back to the U.S, go through the visa process, and fly back to China before the start of the new term. Just getting a flight back within a reasonable time frame proved to be a challenge: I ended up flying first to Bangkok and then, after a twelve-hour layover, on to LAX where I waited overnight in the international food court before I could finally catch a morning flight back to Seattle.

This incident helped me to see how much Martyn meant to me. I knew I wanted to be closer—physically—to him, and I knew that one way to achieve that would be by pursuing a path he had already followed. Ever since I finished my MFA in early 2004, I had toyed with idea of going back to university to earn my Ph.D, and since the idea of taking classes did not appeal to me for a variety of reasons, the research-only format of the doctoral degree in Ireland and the UK seemed ideal. That enrolling as a postgraduate student would also allow me to live over there for a few years gave me the final push I needed. One of the projects I worked on after returning to Seattle was applying to several universities.

Before I sent in my applications, however, I saw Martyn in person for the first time since we met. He attended the MLA conference in San Francisco in late December 2009 and then flew up to visit me through New Year’s and my birthday (January 3). We stayed in a cozy in on lower Queen Anne near an Irish pub and an outstanding Indian restaurant. We went to the waterfront where a seagull attempted to intimidate us into handing over our fries. I took him to my favorite cookie bakery in the Pike Place Market. At the Seattle Art Museum, we built on each other’s interpretations of paintings. We watched the New Year’s fireworks over the Space Needle, something I had never done despite growing up in the area. Most importantly, we found each other at least as attractive as we had before. He didn’t even mind my habit of yelling at CNN when I found their coverage slanted. Rather, he said he appreciated my passion. We changed our Facebook relationship statuses to “In a Relationship”. This time, I suggested it to save him the stress.

I finished my applications in February and tried to focus on my freelance work until the decisions came. In the meantime, Martyn and I met up again in New York since he had been invited by a panel organizer to give a paper at the New Jersey College English Association conference. We met at JFK. My flight arrived a few hours before his, and it took about an hour after he landed for him to get through passport control and customs. I had begun to worry that he was having trouble with immigration. We held each other for a long time once he came through those doors into the arrival hall.

The first night of our visit was St. Patrick’s Day. We ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant; we ordered margaritas and were asked for ID. When the server saw Martyn’s passport—which refers to the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”–he wished him a happy St. Pat’s Day. The two of us shared a laugh about that. Then we found a small Irish bar where we could drink whiskey and beer late into the night.

On the rest of our free days, we visited the MOMA, Central Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge along with a variety of restaurants, bars, and cafes. I had lived in New York for a year a while before we met and what positive memories I had of the place were clouded by the pain caused by a relationship with a man who turned abusive. Wandering the city with Martyn helped me reclaim that psychic terrain. We also saw a play about Elizabeth Bishop’s visits to Ezra Pound in the asylum where he was kept instead of being executed for his support of the Fascists during World War II. We enjoyed the play but during a discussion that followed muttered to each other about the statements made by a Pound biographer. We agreed, for instance, that Pound’s anti-semitism could not be excused as a relic of the times, since they were the same times when James Joyce wrote about Leopold Bloom.

As for the conference itself, when his panel’s organizer asked if I had come to help keep Martyn out trouble, I replied that I had come to help him cause trouble. To tell the truth, I don’t think he needed any assistance.

On the day we left New York, his flight departed first. The only reason I could bear to kiss him goodbye before he went through the security checkpoint was that I knew we had a plan to move closer together. Still, I watched him go as long as I could see him.

By July, the same month in which we had met two years before, I knew that I would be attending Queen’s University Belfast, about two hundred miles away from Hull. No doubt living so great a distance away from one’s partner can be an obstacle, but for us it opens up new possibilities: regular weekend visits and a greater ability to travel to conferences together. Maybe once I graduate, we will be able to find work in the same city, even live in the same apartment. For now, for us, two hundred miles seems like the same neighborhood.

Our relationship started in summer; it is appropriate that we should take this next step in the season that follows. If you’ve ever seen a whole forest turn brilliant red, then you know the beauty that autumn can bring. It may not be a season of new growth, but something wonderful is made nonetheless.

Recently, Shared Worlds asked five well-known authors of speculative fiction the following question: “What’s your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?”. China Miéville‘s answer at least comes as no surprise:

Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can’t quite make sense of, though we know it’s there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it’s a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.

It’s worth noting that not one of the authors, even those from the US, chose a US city. Certainly, I couldn’t make  an argument for any of the cities I’ve lived in within its borders. Seattle is too much on the edge of now, New York and San Francisco too marked by a too recent past.

The cities for which I could make an argument are in Asia. There’s Tokyo of course with its high-tech towers, trains, and phones as well as shrines and forests for the fantasy element; rearranging the syllables gets you Kyoto, where you have a similar level of technology as well as more famous shrines and temples, most of which have been rebuilt to appear ancient. Nagasaki would be my choice for a ghost story; its violent history did not begin with the dropping of the bomb. 

Moving on to the mainland, Kuala Lumpur could be supported as a spec-fic city for similar reasons: there are the tremendous heights of the Petronas Towers and the rain forest of Bukit Nanas. In Cambodia, Siem Reap has its proximity to the ruins of a lost civilization, which presents all kinds of story possibilities; the ever-present tourists, and the contrast between their lifestyles and the lives of the local residents provide for the possibility of sub-plots addressing social inequality.

As settings for speculative fiction, however, all of these pale in comparison to Shanghai. The obvious SF zone is Pudong with its glistening skyscrapers and the retro-future Oriental Pearl Tower. Across the Huangpu (and who knows what creatures might rise from that river, resulting perhaps from experiments conducted by the naval ships that pass?), towers behind the old colonial buildings of the Bund appear to have been fitted with lasers. Contrasting the lives of migrant workers and residents of Shanghai’s older districts with these glistening futurismic areas provides the same sort of opportunity for addressing social inequality that I mentioned in Siem Reap, only it is heightened by the general dystopian air created by the PRC‘s authoritarian government. Moreover, like so many of these other cities, Shanghai possesses the temples and shrines that can serve as entrances for powerful and fantastic entities.

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