China Archives - max gladstone

Posts Tagged ‘China’

The Chinese Opium Wars, by Jack Beeching

It’s delightful to read someone who makes no bones about the arrogance and hypocrisy surrounding the Opium Wars, yet nevertheless is steeped enough in proper British schooling to refer to ships, their crew, and their weaponry in the old-fashioned manner (e.g. “Claremont (78 guns) waited opposite the bay, loaded with grape and ball”). Pull sentence from the most recent chapter:

Jack Tar could not be kept from the rice wine.

“Jack Tar” referring to British seamen.

“The Four Modernizations,” Available Now!

Like China? Like zombies? Like being afraid? Who doesn’t! So read my new short story, “The Four Modernizations,” available in the most recent issue of Necrotic Tissue magazine. Buy it on Amazon.

I’m very excited by this one: the magazine prints up beautifully, has a range of horror stories from the unsettling to the grotesque, and I’m tickled to see my name on the cover next to the rotting corpse.

China Dispatch vol. 3 #7: I come from the Land of the Ice and Snow…

Science doesn’t have all the answers. Take cold, for example. If I’m remembering high school chemistry, then high school physics, then college chemistry and college physics right, “cold” (or “heat” for that matter) essentially refers to the amount of energy something has. If an object (using the term object loosely here, so it refers to places, people, drinks, etc.) is “hot” it’s more energetic, all those little molocules jumping around and bouncing off one another like animals in one of the dance numbers in The Lion King; if that same thing is cold there’s less energy, molocules, atoms, whatever moving more slowly, then more slowly still, until finally at absolute zero they freeze into lock-step. And then it’s possible, a friend of mine told me once, to get into *negative* temperatures, but I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about then — no doubt due to an obstinate and bullheaded refusal of mine to associate temperature with anything other than, well, *temperature*, hot and cold and all that, which may be old-fashioned but is nevertheless a reflex of mine — and I’m not going to attempt to explain it now.

(Though, parenthetically, if anyone does know or would like to take a second try at explaining to me what a negative temperature might be, I promise to be more flexible.)

Anyway! The point of all this babble is to say that the commonly-held impression of cold is wrong, as I know! Or, if not wrong, then at least incomplete. China, oddly enough for a country that burns like a somewhat congenial if polluted furnace from May to August,
has a way of showing one kinds of cold one didn’t quite think existed. There’s cold as in my house in southern Anhui province, wet and just above freezing, which wouldn’t be a problem save that there’s a shortage of indoor heating in Anhui, or at least indoor heating that doesn’t excoriate you and squeeze every ounce of moisture from your tortured flesh. So when the cold creeps in through layers of coat and sweater and long underwear and so forth, it doesn’t leave. Ever. Like the spiders on your ceiling and the field mice who creep around your window at night looking for ways to sneak in, it becomes a constant companion.
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Cambodia/Thailand Special China Crossover Edition: “A Long Way From Home…”

This morning I woke at 4:30 AM in a white-walled motel room outside Phnom Penh International Airport to the angry, full-voiced chirp of a gecko on the wall; it scuttled for cover behind the curtains when I sat up. And now, I’m sitting back on Stephanie’s couch in Beijing, waiting for her to get off work (her crazy, backbreaking work, poor woman, she left New York and came to just about the only place on the planet where your time as a legal assistant is in even higher demand – save me from professions, if not from professional salaries!) so we can grab a bite to eat and maybe watch some of Rome before bed. It’s cold outside, though dry, the horrid ice-tentacles that have seized the southern half of the Chan’s Great Continent having spared the capital mostly. My students back in southern Anhui are seeing more snow than they have known since they were in grade school. There are no snow plows in Anhui, there are no salt trucks, there are no paved roads going out to most of their houses. They are sleeping eight to a concrete bunker of a room, waiting for the weather to let up – or so I hear.

And, as I said, this morning I awoke some eleven degrees and thirty-three minutes north of the equator to the chirp of a gecko and the cry of a bird in the palm tree outside my window and the burbling and coughing of an air conditioner that sounded more like the engine of a particularly tuburculotic old station wagon. Around midnight, awake for the second time due to the noise, I had tried to sleep without the AC, but then the heat and wet stickiness set in, and the scratchy sheets, and the bugs, and the complete lack of ventilation in the concrete motel room, and I gave in.

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