Asia Literary Review No. 25, Winter 2012 Sampler

No. 25, Autumn 2012

No. 25, Autumn 2012 Publisher Ilyas Khan Managing Editor Duncan Jepson Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Literary Editor Kelly Falconer Features Editor Kathleen Hwang Consulting Editor Peter Koenig Office Manager Canny Au Design and Production Steffan Leyshon-Jones Proofs Shirley Lee Main Cover Image Crime and Corruption © Harry Harrison Back Cover Image Paco Larrañaga in handcuffs. From the documentary Give Up Tomorrow, courtesy of Michael Collins and Marty Syjuco.

The Asia Literary Review is published by Print Work Limited 2401, Winsome House, 73 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong asialiteraryreview.com Subscriptions: subs@asialiteraryreview.com Submissions: subm@asialiteraryreview.com Editor: editor@asialiteraryreview.com Editorial: (852) 2167 8947 Advertising: (852) 2167 8910/8980 Translation of The Wind’s Voice printed with kind permission of Mai Jia and Brian Holton.

Extract from Delhi Durbar printed with kind permission from Hachette, India.

Translation of Private Eyes printed courtesy of the Grayhawk Literary Agency.

Extract from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Reloaded printed with kind permission from Campfire Books.

Adaptation of Smaller and Smaller Circles printed with kind permission of Jacaranda Literary Agency and the University of the Philippines Press.

Adaptation of To the People, Food Is Heaven © 2012 by Audra Ang, with kind permission of Lyons Press, www.lyonspress.com.

Images in ‘Give Up Tomorrow’ printed courtesy of Michael Collins and Marty Syjuco.

Images in ‘The Colour of Money’ printed courtesy of Zhang Bingjian.

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Chan Sheung Kee Book Co., Ltd. ISBN: 978-988-16596-2-0 Individual contents ©2012 the contributors/Print Work Limited This compilation ©2012 Print Work Limited

Contents From the Editor

7

Fiction A Day in the Life of Curly Jones, Lawyer

9

John Burdett

Delhi Durbar

31

Krishan Partap Singh

Eyes of Karma

61

Tew Bunnag

Smaller and Smaller Circles

75

F. H. Batacan

Private Eyes

109

Chi Wei-Jan translated by Anna Holmwood

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Reloaded

119

Poulomi Mukherjee illustrated by Amit Tayal

I’m Praising Him Right Now

135

Prosper Anyalechi translated by Dreux Richard

The Wind’s Voice

161

Mai Jia translated by Brian Holton

Poetry Rules for Citizens

30

Life Sentence

40

Jeet Thayil

3

When They Fought for Free-doom!

50

Gopilal Acharya

Silent Cooking and Noisy Munching

58

Chattai

59

What She Said to Her Girlfriend

60

Sivakami Velliangiri

Public Cremation

73

John Barger

Love Poem

101

Reid Mitchell

Yodok 15

126

Dreams of Men

128

JĂŠanpaul Ferro

Y

134

A Concise History of China in English

151

Changming Yuan

Spoken Word

176

Ma Yan translated by Catherine Platt

Non-Fiction China: A Way Out of Corruption

25

He Jiahong translated by James McMath

Interview: Jeet Thayil

41

Martin Alexander

How a Maoist Is Made

45

Shashi Warrier

Pakistan: A Culture of Corruption?

Farrukh Saleem 4

53

India: Decades in Convolution

87

Dilip D’Souza

Give Up Tomorrow

94

Luis H. Francia

The Miserable Mrs Marcos

103

Carla Camille L. Mendoza

North Korea: Absolute Power and Absolute Corruption

129

Jang Jin-sung translated by Shirley Lee

Interview: Wang Xiaofang

147

Shu-Ching Jean Chen

Mortal Taste

153

Audra Ang

Images The Colour of Money

22

Zhang Bingjian

Reviews Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie

179

Alisha Haridasani

Hanging Devils by He Jiahong

183

Kelly Falconer

Bonded Labor by Siddharth Kara

186

Kathleen Hwang

In Memoriam Remembering a Friend of the Review – Gore Vidal

189

Ilyas Khan

Contributors

191 5

From the Editor It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear

C

orruption, though our cover may suggest otherwise, is no laughing matter – at least not for its victims. Harry Harrison’s cartoon exposes the grinning faces of those in power who benefit from corruption, but between these covers we offer a glimpse of the incalculable damage it causes across our region. Zhang Bingjian’s expanding collection of portraits (‘The Colour of Money’) showcases the number officials convicted in China, and we are introduced elsewhere to countless victims and the circumstances that force them into complicity.

Those who benefit seem to enjoy increasing impunity and are even admired as role models. Is corruption now the exception? Or the rule?

Several of our writers differentiate between individual and systemic corruption. Every society has its criminal elements, but when institutional corruption dominates, many of those who would otherwise be inclined to abide by the law may cease to respect it. In the worst cases, we are reminded of what Sir Hersch Lauterpacht described in his opening speech to the Nuremburg Tribunal in 1945 as: ‘dictators and gangsters masquerading as a state’.

We explore these issues in their different manifestations across Asia, but it’s not all grim reading. Some of our poets convey a yearning for the ideal, and a tender sense of that imperceptible transition from the simplicity of 7

From the Editor

innocence to the complexity of experience. The ideal of unimpeachable integrity is essential to the way we define our humanity and measure the depths of our corruption.

But vice is often more interesting than virtue: we open this issue with John Burdett’s long-lunching lawyer, meet a priest whose forensic skills uncover a macabre – and thankfully fictional – series of murders, follow an inexperienced but keen Taiwanese detective, and see Tokyo’s seedy nightlife through the eyes of immigrant Nigerian touts surviving on their wits.

The thin end of criminality’s wedge affects us all. As our contributor Dilip D’Souza suggests, few of us have never broken a law. Sometimes, otherwise minor transgressions can turn into a nightmare, as it did for Paco Larrañaga, the subject of Michael Collins’s award-winning documentary Give Up Tomorrow.

The makers of the film recorded hundreds of hours of footage; however, the shape of the documentary didn’t emerge until late in the process. We’ve had a similar experience. We invited writers to tell us about crime and corruption and asked them not to pull any punches. Several shied away, often to avoid compromising their positions; others delivered complex and compelling commentary. At least one has written under an assumed name.

On page 50 we welcome our first Bhutanese writer, Gopilal Acharya, who was longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Prize for Literature. We also include an interview with Jeet Thayil, whose poetry we feature and whose debut novel, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year.

As we go to press, his inclusion on the longlist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature has been announced.

On a final and very different note, this issue concludes with a tribute to the late Gore Vidal, an old friend of our publisher, Ilyas Khan. Vidal encouraged him to bring Asian voices to the attention of Western audiences, and was one of the first subscribers to the Asia Literary Review.

Martin Alexander

8

Some of the 1600 portraits of convicted officials in Zhang Bingjian’s Beijing studio.

22

The Colour of Money Zhang Bingjian

H

all of Fame, a series of portraits commissioned by filmmaker and contemporary artist Zhang Bingjian, acknowledges that corruption is often the path to fame and fortune. To date, over 1600 have been completed, each depicting a Chinese official convicted of corruption and painted in the distinctive pink of the Chinese 100-yuan note. The colour is not the red of revolution – that’s long gone – but neither is it the blush of shame.

Zhang says the question he is asked the most is, ‘How can you ever finish this piece? It’s impossible; there are too many.’ But to him, the number is no longer important. ‘The work is witness to what is happening in China now. It’s like a documentary. Corruption is deeply rooted in society.’ He says the work is for the future because ‘we forget things too fast’.

To protect the project Zhang focusses only on officials who have been tried and convicted. So far it has not been banned – articles about his portraits have appeared in Chinese media including Xinhua and Global Times, as well as on BBC and CBS. Still, no mainland gallery has agreed to host his exhibit.

23

Chinese officials convicted of corruption from Zhang Bingjian’s collection, the Hall of Fame.

24

Jeet Thayil

Rules for Citizens 1. Let us govern those who undertake the telling of stories.

2. Censorship is good governance. Self-censorship is an attribute of the highest civilization.

3. If an actor speaks of God, he will be chastised. He will be refused an encore. If he repeats the speech, he will have his licence revoked.

4. Let us govern those who undertake praise of the next world, since what they say is neither true nor useful to us.

5. Our best recourse is to be warlike.

6. We do not deny that storytellers are good at their job and give people what they like to hear. But the better they are, the less we wish our children and men to hear them.

7. We shall refute their attempts to be wise. We shall scoff when they repeat their vile allegation, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.

8. We will do away with the dirges of famous men and leave them for women, and not the best among women either.

9. Let us abolish those fearful and terrific names, Cocytos, the River of Lamentations, Styx, the River of Fear, Ganga, the River of Death in Life, Lethe, the River of Bliss, Tigris, the River of Affliction.

10. We shall disallow travel and the mingling of songs.

30

Jeet Thayil

Life Sentence Let’s say you’re not opposed to the ghost In principle, you understand her neediness – And let’s say she’s distracted, or busy, She’s busy looking for a way back in, But the shore appears distant, Not to mention impossible to attain, A far-off place where her former friends No longer speak her name, which is lost, And no word she hears is audible Through the static and the clatter; So let’s say you forget to speak her name, You do not repeat her lovely name Because your talk is of meat and money, And let’s say you’re not crazy or bitter, It’s just that you don’t want to hear her say, Why, why didn’t you look after me?

40

© B asso C an n ar sa

Interview: Jeet Thayil Martin Alexander

J

eet Thayil is a performance poet, songwriter and guitarist. He has published four collections of poetry and edited The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008). His debut novel, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and – breaking news – longlisted for The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Notorious for his selfconfessed former addiction to heroin and alcohol, and famous for his youthful good looks, he currently lives in New Delhi.

One of the many striking things about Narcopolis is its cornucopia of narratives, voices and forms. What in your reading influenced you in constructing the novel?

I’ve always admired novels that try to encompass an entire universe within their pages. Of course, it is an impossible quest, doomed to failure, but 41

Interview: Jeet Thayil

the failure is a success in its way. I’ve admired the Russian novelists of the nineteenth century for exactly this quality, for the anarchic variety of voices and forms, and for the absolute freedom they allowed themselves. ‘If nothing is true, everything is permitted.’ The Russians took no prisoners.

Each of Dostoyevsky’s novels was written as if it were his last, as if he’d never write again, so that he had to put everything into it. As a strategy, it is far removed from the way novels are written today. At least not as we know it.

Dimple, in his/her observant ambivalence, sits at the centre of the novel.

She’s extraordinary, as is Mr Lee – who surprises us with the China narrative and his incongruous but entirely believable closeness to Dimple. How did these characters and their relationship come to you?

I knew China would be a part of the book. I didn’t know how big a part until I started to write the section that came to be titled ‘Story of the Pipe’.

It is an unexpected Russian-style digression into China, but the title tells the reader why it is there and how it feeds off and into the main narrative.

I grew up in Hong Kong, and lived there for most of the seventies. It is difficult to live in close proximity to the Chinese without being affected by how encompassing and far-reaching the culture is. This happens to Dimple, too. Her connection with Mr Lee becomes familial, and one of the two defining relationships of her life.

The book subverts many of the conventions of writing. Was this deliberately iconoclastic, and was the experience exhilarating or terrifying, or both? When did you know that your approach was working?

It wasn’t deliberately iconoclastic; it was deliberately literary. The literary novel has a long tradition of formal innovation. But I don’t think I did anything new. I allowed myself to approximate other kinds of literary or artistic endeavour: the poem, the song, the proverb, the list, the line drawing, a description of an imaginary book or movie. I’m often full of doubt; but there was a moment early on when I knew the story was worth following as far as it led. It was after I wrote the chapter titled ‘A Walk on Shuklaji Street’ that I felt I’d opened an arterial vein. The poet says poems are never finished; they are abandoned. I think that may be true of a certain kind of novel as well.

42

Martin Alexander

You’re a poet, so it’s not surprising that Narcopolis is full of poetry. That’s probably inevitable, but how did you come to make that transition from short-form work to something so huge and sprawling?

I’ve always written prose. It’s just that I didn’t have the ambition or the discipline or the resources to finish a long-form piece. Every time I’d attempted a novel I’d given up at some point, frustrated by how slender and unsuccessful my efforts had been. In 2004 I gave up drugs and regular employment and became a full-time writer; I ran out of excuses.

Do you think poets bring a special quality to the novel?

There is a long list of poets who turned to prose – for example, Roberto Bolaño, Denis Johnson, V. S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje. Of course, Naipaul may not agree with that description, but he did write poems very early in his career. I suppose the discipline of poetry teaches you economy if not parsimony, and the power of compression, and it shows you the portmanteau possibility of words.

Narcopolis seems to dissect the politics of Indian society. Do you see it as a political work?

I am always disappointed when people refer to Narcopolis as a drug novel.

The drugs are a frame, or a hook on which to hang a tale about Indian society.

How did people in India respond to the novel’s depiction of the country and its cultures and people?

With a notable lack of enthusiasm.

Few if any Indian reviewers would have foreseen the Man Booker nomination and I understand that the Indian publishers you submitted it to rejected the manuscript. Has it been more warmly – or heatedly – received since then? What does that say about the literary establishment in India?

There has been an about-turn in the tone of the Indian media after the favourable reviews from the West. It tells us that India’s literary establishment – though that may be a misnomer, let’s call it the world of Indian book journalism – is as colonial as it has ever been: we still need white men to tell us what is worthwhile about our own culture.

43

Interview: Jeet Thayil

You’ve reached a sudden prominence through the Man Booker shortlist, though you were sceptical of your chances when we last spoke. On the day of the announcement, what were your thoughts on the whole experience, and on the judges’ final choice?

Just another day at the office. I’m glad to get back to real life and real work, though it was an interesting carousel while it lasted.

You told me that you’d brought the draft of your new novel with you to Hong Kong. Can you tell us a little about it? Is it related in any way to Narcopolis?

I’m working on a novel with the working title of The Book of Chocolate Saints. Chocolate here is skin colour, not a food group. The central character is Newton Xavier, who appears for a chapter in Narcopolis, though it is a long chapter and he owns it and people have asked why he disappears; well, it is this book that he disappears into.

The word ‘narcopolis’ inevitably resonates in the reader with the unspoken echo of ‘necropolis’. How much is your novel a city of the dead, and how do the two words resonate for you?

For me, Narcopolis is a city of the dead and a city of intoxication. I thought it was an apt title because under it, like a secret title, is the word ‘necropolis’; the book exists, then, as a kind of memorial on which certain names are carved in stone.

44

Gopilal Acharya

When They Fought for Free-doom!

Darkness is here again!

Let us end this cloak-and-dagger talk.

“Yes, they were shot point-blank.”

Embers are red. Summer was bad.

We grew some maize.

Let’s quickly finish our meal (A roasted corn cob and a bowl of thin black tea.)

Silence. Darkness.

We should not be talking now.

Our walls grow ears in the dark.

Tonight is unbelievably silent except for the buzzing mosquitoes – Bloody opportunists! – waiting for a killing suck.

Darkness brought them as it brings our enemies to our fields and the silence shall not last for long.

50

Gopilal Acharya

What shall we do?

Our soil is failing us our spirit is turning brittle.

It was no good. Those speeches made and the meetings attended.

Those cutlasses sharpened and the sound and the fury raised.

We believed we were fighting for a cause.

All bastions of freedom How do you say that? Free-doom?

It is all over now.

We had our free-doom – Absolutely free when we were happily dispossessed, disowned.

Tonight we live in silence and obedience.

We have stopped talking.

We have learnt to live and partly live.

There is a curfew tonight.

I look through the peephole into the darkness.

51

Poetry

Those black guards with their guns slung over their shoulders are working our fields with bullets.

This night, sung by mosquitoes, drummed by bullets – do I hear the thunder?

It’s going to rain again.

Embers are long dead.

The night is soot-dark, celebrated by mosquitoes gunshots and the rain.

Oh Lord! Have mercy on all who shall appear to thee tonight, for tomorrow we shall attend their funeral.

52

Sivakami Velliangiri

Silent Cooking and Noisy Munching When I came to my husband’s hometown I saw for the first time old women with gagged mouths cooking for the gods, in silence.

Their breath did not pollute the offerings, nor their spittle desecrate the dishes only their arms swayed and perhaps their eyeballs.

I thought how unlike the witches of Macbeth they looked, for these women moved about with grace their mind fine tuned to the Dhivya Prasadam.

Not any woman can cook for the gods.

One must be chaste and pure, like unadulterated ghee boil like jaggery and rise like milk. In short, it takes thirty years to graduate.

So for thirty years I have done my silent cooking made manna with words and said simply in my heart of hearts, eat god eat line by line, crunchy words, palatable punctuations tangy rhythms moulded with meaning, and thoughts weaned in silence but spoken as poems.

58

Sivakami Velliangiri

Chattai The first time grandma wore a blouse, she felt she had tarnished her brown skin.

All the men folk knew of the thin bare shoulders.

She ran to the temple and confessed that she had merely obeyed the Maharani’s orders.

Sure she had lost her native natural gloss when she carried rice pots on her head (the anthapura boasted a female barber who shaved off armpits and whatever).

The Maharani bade her women wear blouses even to the temple. What my grandma missed was the breeze on her skin. What she acquired was a certain coy feeling and a sense of hiding which was akin to sin.

The anthapura was the harem of an Indian palace.

59

Poetry

What She Said to Her Girlfriend Though my lord has given me a palace in every city to match the seasonal mood with interiors like an Inside Outside magazine and furniture that speaks of star war design I wish he had also thought of a poison apple tree at the back door of the house where I could whisper and confess to it all he had done to me the previous night.

60

John Barger

Public Cremation Pashupatinath Temple, Kathmandu No promise of grey in your hair, now basted with damp hay. Your face fleshy, healthy.

You were young, rich. Hard to tell if you were good.

Nobody is crying. Where is your mother?

They, your cousins and uncles, dip your smooth feet in grey bilge, the smog-trickle of Bagmati River.

A crowd leans toward the death spectacle over a bridge that pigeons sail under.

Upriver, a woman washes her feet, carefully.

They wrap your dark penis in cloth. Each touches your hair. All part of the ceremony.

Nobody minds when a tourist cuts in to snap a pic of your face. Monkeys slide down a temple roof. Boys hock a loogie over the ghat.

Nepali pop shrieks on a cheap radio.

They find a note in your pocket and examine it.

They lay a torch at your throat. Ashes and butterflies issue forth. Sadhus – the dead ones, cohorts of ghosts, stoned gods, thinking as stones think – walk about as if lost. Your thighs are ash, your robe butterflies. Your toes boil.

That which was dark and alchemical turns to flies, butterflies, your thick hair smoke 73

Poetry

and your eyes butterflies. Your foot is yellow and your thigh bone surfaces. Hand open, palm charred. Your ribs are revealed.

When two monkeys begin humping in the ford, the crowd laughs loudly and without malice.

74

Among the accused in the dock, Paco Larra単aga asks in vain to be heard.

94

Give Up Tomorrow Luis H. Francia

I

n 1995 in the Philippines’ Cebu Island capital of Cebu City, a seventeenyear-old Filipino by the name of Francisco Osmeña Larrañaga, otherwise known as Paco, appeared on the National Bureau of Investigation’s list of juvenile delinquents. The teenager, who had a swagger about him and a temper, had been involved in a car-park scuffle, little more than a display of youthful bravado and arrogance of the sort that happens everywhere.

Two years later, on 16 July 1997, Marijoy and Jacqueline Chiong, Cebuana sisters in their early twenties, failed to return home after work. On 18 July the blindfolded, battered and handcuffed body of a young woman was found in a local ravine. She had been raped. The Cebu police and the Chiong family initially declared it wasn’t one of the missing. However, a few days later, and under pressure to resolve the case, the police identified the body as Marijoy’s by slicing skin from the corpse’s fingers and comparing it with the prints on Marijoy’s voter ID card – a determination independent forensic investigators would later question. The Chiong family endorsed this revised finding.

Using an affidavit secured from a market vendor who lived near the ravine, the police formulated a theory that a gang of drug addicts was responsible.

Apparently, the affidavit, written in English – a language the vendor didn’t speak – stated that she’d heard a group of men that night shouting, ‘Run, run!’, which she’d assumed had caused the distraught woman to fall into the ravine – an assertion the vendor was later to deny.

Two months later, Paco and six other young men were arrested and accused of the murder. Thus began the Kafkaesque odyssey of a young man 95

Give Up Tomorrow

who, along with his six co-accused ( Josman Aznar, Rowen Adlawen, Ariel Balansag, Alberto Caño, James Anthony Uy and James Andrew Uy), was denied a fair trial in a court presided over by a judge, Martin Ocampo, who had a habit of nodding off on the bench and who clearly favoured the prosecution. Despite only flimsy and circumstantial evidence against them, despite a well-documented alibi in Paco’s case and despite judicial misconduct, all seven were convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. At the time of writing, they have been in prison for fifteen years.

The prize-winning documentary, Give Up Tomorrow, examines this case and Paco’s role in it, laying out the facts and circumstances in sober and methodical fashion. Directed by Michael Collins and produced by Marty Syjuco, the documentary is neither strident nor disinterested. It simply marshals evidence so convincingly that the viewer cannot help but conclude that Paco and his co-accused have suffered a grave miscarriage of justice.

Syjuco is not an objective observer – his brother is married to Paco’s older sister, Mimi, a relationship declared early on, and which explains the focus on just one of the seven accused. The documentary builds systematically on a wealth of sources, including trial records, media reports and interviews with journalists, prosecutors, defence lawyers, family members of both the accused and the victims, and with Paco himself. In light of so much material, the viewer is left puzzled – and aghast – that the case ever made it to court.

Human rights organizations including Amnesty International, Fair Trials International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission arrived at the same conclusion; as did a number of local and Spanish journalists; as did the Spanish government itself. Paco is a Spanish citizen through his father’s nationality, and the family eventually called upon Spain to help them secure Paco’s extradition and transfer to a Spanish prison. They had hoped he would be released soon after arriving in Spain, just as they had hoped each absurd episode of their nightmare in the Philippines would be the last.

The trial in Cebu unfolded amidst tabloid frenzy, inciting the public and the Chiong family to bay for blood. Larrañaga and most of the other accused were either Spanish or Chinese mestizos (Paco is both), and in a country where mixed blood often characterizes the privileged class this stoked the fire of public resentment. Paco’s father, Manuel, is a former jai alai player and a Spanish Basque; his mother, Margot, belongs to the politically powerful 96

Luis H. Francia

Osmeña clan, and is of Chinese ancestry. Sergio Osmeña, the patriarch, was president of the Philippines from 1944 to just before the country gained its independence from the United States in 1946.

Paco’s arrest was apparently based on his inclusion on the NBI list, which the police had used to trawl for suspects. At the time of the murder, Paco was attending the Center for Culinary Arts in Quezon City, Metro Manila. He provided ample Upper: The Chiongs react to the verdict with dismay. evidence that he was there Mrs Chiong holds a picture of her daughters. on the day and night of the Lower: Media frenzy. crime. On 16 July 1997 he had attended class, gone out later that night with his classmates to a local restaurant and bar, and sat for an exam the next morning. Thirty-five witnesses (classmates and teachers) attested to this, and photographs were produced of the group and Paco at the bar.

But the press (and the court) ignored this evidence and focused instead on the lurid details of the crime. Teddy Boy Locsin, a well-known journalist and lawyer who later became a three-term congressman for the wealthy district of Makati, was televised standing beside the grave of the victim and cupping his hands. ‘This,’ he says, ‘was the amount of semen found in the victim.’ He then describes the accused as, ‘These animals [who] were not born drugged; they made themselves into drug addicts.’ Referring to Paco’s statement that he did not know the Uy brothers prior to their arrest, Locsin notes with contempt: ‘As a Spanish-blooded mestizo, he would never mix with Chinks like the Uys.’ He gratuitously describes the Uys as ‘bananas – yellow on the outside, white on the inside’.

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Give Up Tomorrow

In the dock, Paco Larrañaga is handcuffed to another of the accused.

Also weighing in was President Joseph Estrada, whom the victims’ mother, Thelma, and her husband, Dionisio, met in July 1998 – a meeting arranged by Thelma’s sister, Cheryl Jimenea, Estrada’s social secretary. Erap, as he is popularly known, was a film star in the 1950s, when he made a name for himself as a fictional crime fighter. It was a role he reprised when, as vice president under President Fidel Ramos, he was named the government’s anti-crime czar. President Estrada instructed four law enforcement agencies to help solve the Chiong case, and intensified the pressure to convict the accused. (The anti-crime Erap was later forced from office – in January 2001 – charged with plundering the public purse. He was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to forty years in prison. He served barely a month before receiving a pardon from his successor, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, now charged with corruption herself.)

The murder trial ended on 11 February 1999 and on 5 May Judge Ocampo found the seven defendants guilty. The sentence of two consecutive terms of life imprisonment failed to appease the Chiongs, who clamoured for the death penalty. President Estrada endorsed their opinion and said the men deserved to die. The judge refused to apply the death penalty (still on the books then), saying there was insufficient evidence that the corpse was 98

Luis H. Francia

in fact that of Marijoy – an incredible statement that in effect undermined the entire case. Ocampo pointed out belatedly that no facial photos had been taken of the dead woman. This raised more questions: Who was the victim, if not Marijoy? Who might be lying in her grave? Might she and her sister still be alive? The body of Jacqueline has never been found.

Judge Ocampo had barred most of the pro-Paco eyewitness testimony, complaining that everyone was saying the same thing, as though corroboration were irrelevant. He denied a request by the defence to exhume the body to verify that it was indeed Marijoy’s. Judge Ocampo also refused Paco’s repeated request to take the stand, a violation of his constitutional right to speak on his own behalf.

Five months later, Judge Ocampo shot and killed himself in a hotel room. According to the film’s director, Ocampo ‘had a reputation as a judge who couldn’t be bought. But evidence of political pressure was everywhere’.

The defence appealed to the Supreme Court and, after deliberating for four years, the justices in 2004 not only let the guilty convictions stand but also imposed the death penalty through lethal injection. (In another sordid twist to the tale, the chief justice, Hilario Davide, Jr, was related by marriage to Thelma Chiong, yet failed to recuse himself.)

Paco now sits in Martutene Prison, near the city of San Sebastián, Spain, where he was sent following the abolition of the death penalty by President Arroyo in 2006 and as a result of a new prisoner-exchange treaty with Madrid that allowed the transfer. The difference between Bilibid Prison in the Philippines and Martutene is, according to Collins, ‘night and day’. There are, for instance, no gangs; at Bilibid – with an original capacity of 8,700, its actual inmate population is more than 20,000 – twelve gangs effectively rule inmate life. Paco and the others had to become members of one, Batang Cebu (Boys of Cebu), for their own protection. In Spain, Paco is granted periodic stays outside on parole. The painful irony is that the parole board will release him permanently only if he admits guilt, which Paco declares he won’t, asking, ‘How can I admit something I didn’t do?’

It is Paco who, on death row at Bilibid, coined the phrase ‘Give Up Tomorrow’. By this he meant that, were he to give up hope of a reprieve, it would not be today. He’d put off giving in to despair till the morrow. He’d repeat this process the next day; it became a question then of when to give 99

Give Up Tomorrow

up, focusing only on the timing. He also made three resolutions: ‘I won’t kill myself, I won’t kill anyone else, and I won’t look for trouble.’ Sound strategy for a life of captivity at Bilibid.

Before the trial began, one promising avenue of investigation seemed to have been disregarded and overlooked: the possible links between the disappearance of the girls and the rift between their father and Peter Lim, the man he worked for and who has long been suspected of being a drug lord. Chiong and Lim had fallen out. Chiong was scheduled to testify before the Congressional Committee on Dangerous Drugs about Lim’s alleged drug trafficking but, shortly before the set date, Marijoy and Jacqueline disappeared. The girls’ father subsequently refused to testify. Were the disappearances simply a coincidence or a not-too-subtle warning to the Chiongs? (Much later Paco’s family, also fearful of Lim’s power, asked that his name be bleeped out of the film when it was shown in the Philippines.)

Leo Lastimosa, one of the few journalists in Cebu who took a neutral tone in his reporting, did point out the tantalizing link to Lim but, as he notes in the film, ‘nobody was interested’. After seeing the film in Cebu City earlier this year, Lastimosa wrote that ‘most importantly the movie has to be seen by those who have hidden knowledge about the case, so they can help answer the questions as to what really happened to the Chiongs’. Lastimosa said he was convinced of Paco’s innocence when Paco refused to admit guilt to secure his release in Spain.

Perhaps the Lim connection was something no one dared touch. The fact that two of the police investigating team had moonlighted as Lim’s bodyguards raises further questions.

Towards the end of Give Up Tomorrow, Mrs Chiong, on learning of Paco’s imminent transfer to Spain, threatens to kill him. ‘I will die thinking of Spain making a fool of me. If Paco comes home I will kill him.’ We are left to wonder why this woman is so intent on pinning the blame for her daughters’ disappearance on the men now behind bars, even when an overwhelming weight of evidence points to their innocence.

An exclusive audio interview with Michael Collins, the director of Give Up Tomorrow, is available on our website.

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Reid Mitchell

Love Poem Thieves in every town, not thieves in every place.

Several bluewalled houses, a stretch of road unmolested.

Some cowbirds shame their families, constructing their own nests.

A woman bore triplets one of whom turned honest – the one kept away most often from her bruised white breasts.

The moon steals light, not the stars, who are no doubt dishonest in their own solar systems under different universal laws.

Thieves in our very blood rob the lungs of oxygen only to be waylaid themselves as their caravans flee down arteries, pumped by half-complicit hearts.

101

Poetry

Of course, hearts are always corrupt – Even yours, you most honest woman who ever trusted her mouth to my tongue to touch and taste.

102

The Miserable Mrs Marcos Carla Camille L. Mendoza

T

he first child of a second wife will always have issues. And when a girl too beautiful and too smart spends the formative years of her life sleeping on a cardboard mat by the family Cadillac, habitually deprived of Lady’s Choice sandwich-spread on her morning pan de sal and amidst many a drama of hapless parenting, expect that something in her head will be seriously messed up.

Imelda Marcos’s father, Vicente López Romualdez, was the humble grandchild of a blue-blooded friar from Spain. Her mother, Remedios Trinidad, grew up impeccably sheltered in a respectable convent that enjoyed the patronage of Manila’s elite. Remedios dabbled in music, literature and the opera. She had beauty, poise and brains. A woman of her calibre was golden during the old days – she could have been big, could have married a much, much better man. Unfortunately she was a penniless convent girl who had brown skin. Perhaps seeing her own assets go to waste motivated Remedios to drive her daughter Imelda’s beauty pageant career.

Imelda never accepted failure. When she lost the competition for Miss Manila, she blushed, cried and cajoled until the mayor crowned her the Muse of Manila, a previously non-existent title. She also was not one to waste time. After a failed romance with Ninoy Aquino, who dumped her for being too bold and too tall, she quickly dismissed him – the one who got away – as a fling. Then rose-tinted Ferdie came along. He readily embraced Catholicism to exchange marital vows with his shy young bride – and cleverly exploited the media to his advantage. These Asian Kennedys knew how to work together from the start.

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The Miserable Mrs Marcos

For an aspiring president of the Philippines it is far more important to know how to sing than to be able to run a country, and for this, Imelda’s singing and provincial upbringing were assets to Ferdie. She was every ounce a geisha on the way to Malacañang: her food measured to maintain her weight; daily agendas filled with cleverly organized events to promote the campaign. However, we must remember that, to begin with, something was very wrong up in her head, and the stress of playing politician’s wife slowly took its toll. Eventually a nervous breakdown bought her a ticket to New York, and a year spent in therapy. But certain moments in history can disappear like liquid through a sieve, and when in 1965 Ferdie made it to the palace, beating Diosdado Macapagal by evangelizing the people with his passion for infrastructure and tourism, Imelda was back in Manila in her high hair and her puffed-up sleeves. Perhaps the American psychiatrist moonlighted as a fashion consultant, extolling the virtues of shoulder pads and high heels.

Imelda came back convinced that a distinctive identity was the key to success, and that art and culture were its vital components. She thought a cultural centre would be the ideal vehicle through which to cultivate this among her people, to say nothing of being a perfect excuse to invite the Reagans over for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. The Cultural Center of the Philippines would be erected to elevate the identity of the ordinary Filipino.

During her husband’s political campaign, Imelda’s maidservant habit of removing her shoes before entering homes and her overall probinsyana vibe did bring her closer to the masses, but it also meant she was never invited to parties at the exclusive Forbes Park. And since she was never accepted by Filipino high society, she decided to host a shindig of her own, welcoming pregnant, daster-clad mothers and tsinelas-shuffling fathers to the Cultural Center. However, it didn’t quite work out as she’d planned. Notice the landscape: the long walk from the car park to the entrance. You’d need a car and a driver to enter it properly. The majesty of the new Cultural Center stood in stark contrast to the poverty of the ordinary Filipinos.

One could frown at the building of a cultural centre at a time when we didn’t even have a culture; nevertheless, we should be thankful to Imelda because every first-world artist, writer, dancer and thinker came to know of Philippine arts and culture due to its association with the former First 104

Carla Camille L. Mendoza

Lady, even if it had begun as an international joke. Genuine appreciation can begin with laughter. The grandest pantheons may be rooted in glitter.

When it comes to marriage, it often happens that one chooses a partner who measures up to oneself. Imelda wasn’t alone with her issues: only a crazy man would marry a crazy woman. Their union was shared insanity, their devotion to each other’s blurred vision its most telling form. Crazy people do crazy things.

Imelda was once content to stand behind her husband, but suddenly she relished standing beside him. There is no telling if Ferdie were thrilled or dismayed. No man likes to stand at a mere 5’5”, especially beside a towering Imelda at a God-given height of 5’8” (or 6’ with heels, escalating to 6’5” with her bouffant hair) and no amount of pomade on Ferdie’s fake black top could make him stand any taller. So he engaged in bodybuilding to make himself look bigger, reportedly popping pills to achieve quicker results.

Apparently he was not satisfied with mere physical power, and declared Martial Law to show he could flex the muscles of the state, if not his own.

Ferdie cancelled all checks and balances. He cancelled the military and the media, too. Perhaps in his perception of reality this was essential for the Filipinisation of the Philippines. Perhaps Martial Law was just one man with one plan and a heavy dose of arts and culture.

Perhaps he reasoned that democracy wasn’t for everyone, particularly those who didn’t know what to do with it. How could a people without a firm sense of identity or self-knowledge understand how to harness power to progress?

Well-formed biceps and pectorals can be pleasing features of the male anatomy but seemed a bit startling on the ageing Ferdie, who at sixty continued to get physical, swallowing his magic potions, destroying his kidneys and loosening his grip on the New Society. His power began to slip away – into the hands of the CIA, the military, his cronies and Imelda herself. And that was when it all started to go wrong.

Martial Law was a time when you could live in Forbes Park and be a mother to a colegiala leftist daughter enrolled at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, who at any time might be arrested and shipped off to a very different sort of life at Fort Bonifacio, never to be seen again.

You would not complain or search for her. Nobody ever cried for a dead communist, even if she had been gracious and beautiful and only eighteen.

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The Miserable Mrs Marcos

Incidentally, Martial Law was a great time for writing. It was the perfect constraint to struggle against. Each printed article made the rebellious writers giddy, and sent them in – or got them out – of prison. Droplets in the political wave they were, their good cause crashing against an obdurate wall.

Not that Imelda didn’t do her share of good deeds. Clad in her pink terno she once sat with Gaddafi, quoting the Quran, expressing her support for peace among Muslims and Christians. Gaddafi was impressed, reportedly smitten with Madame, deeming her too intelligent for a woman, pleading for her conversion to Islam. Thus, weapons funding for the Mindanao insurgents was stopped and Madame was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Her illusions of grandeur had always been criminal, but with each accomplishment they became more magnificent. The day arrived when she started considering herself Filipina royalty. Perhaps she believed rubbing shoulders with truly titled couples and royal families from other countries elevated her to a similar status. Rumour has it that she tried to set up her daughter, Imee, with Britain’s Prince Charles; that she had the audacity to wear a crown to Buckingham Palace, where she was asked to remove it. She resisted, loath to demean her precious stones; in the end she had no choice but to turn her tiara into a choker.

Europe was beautiful. Europe was lovely. Imelda fell in love, and then it struck her: ‘I could do this at home!’ Her extravagance rose to the point of becoming a national disgrace. When you attended Imelda’s parties, you’d go home with a Rolex. If you were a foreign VIP, you’d be housed in European splendour.

There is a memorable scene in the fanboy life of the controversial Manila tour guide and performing activist, Carlos Celdran. As he describes it: TV host Daphne Oseña: Oh, Madame! Have you met Carlos Celdran?

He does a tour in the Coconut Palace about you!

Madame: Oh, hello, Carlos, let’s pretend we have exchanged respective pleasantries. Listen, here’s a little information to add to your tour. They say Filipinos can’t build pretty houses because they have only coconut and bamboo. So, Mrs Marcos resorted to making a palace out of only (hand-carved, hand-crafted and laminated) coconut and bamboo. Mrs Marcos wanted to show that there is no excuse for being ugly.

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Carla Camille L. Mendoza

Along with this obsession with beauty came an obsession with celebrity.

In the seventies, the Philippines became the world’s third most prolific movie producer, churning out more than 300 movies a year. You may remember major films branded with the titanic names of Oliver Stone, Lino Brocka and Chuck Norris. Even the admirable politician Juan Ponce Enrile might have watched The Year of Living Dangerously. International films were shot in the Philippines, a testament to the world’s faith in the country’s safety and security. Imelda, ever the social butterfly, began to attend prestigious film festivals all around the world. Today we condemn the government for not paying much attention or providing funding to local artists. Today, without a tiny Imelda inside our heads, we Filipinos hardly have the guts to tell the rest of the world how amazing we are. Back then, we had a cheerleader, someone who was sure we could do anything at home as well as it was done elsewhere.

Hence a Manila Film Center was born. Unfortunately, while it was being built, a sudden, heavy rain shower brought down the scaffolding, trapping dozens of workmen underneath. An unknown number were feared buried in quick-drying cement. One would think that a meticulous search would have been carried out, at least to console the grieving families, but no. Imelda ordered that construction should continue. The launch of the Manila International Film Festival was looming and Imelda, that most theatrical of actresses, didn’t want to disappoint her important guests. The show must go on.

Such excesses eventually brought the Filipino people out to the broad avenue, EDSA, to perform a class war masked as a revolution and a miracle.

And then Ninoy Aquino, returning home from self-imposed exile in America, was shot dead – in broad daylight – as he emerged from a plane at Manila airport. Who could have arranged such a thing?

When you live in an invisible country floating on the edge of the Pacific and run by an ailing president and his party-loving wife, a country where ignorance is endemic and people can survive on gossip, just how much of what you think you know is true? Twenty-six years ago, as he boarded the helicopter to flee Malacañang, legend has it that Ferdie misheard the pilot name his hometown, ‘Paoay’, as their destination. Actually, they were headed for Hawaii.

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The Miserable Mrs Marcos

Currently sitting on the throne is Noynoy, the son of the Philippines’ true queen, Corazon Aquino, Ninoy’s widow who was elected president in his stead. Noynoy is striving to strengthen the economy of a country that has been a disgrace for decades. Yet alongside the challenge of managing the country, he is also on a desperate quest to find a bride before his term ends in 2016. If he fails, who will inherit the throne?

Imelda lives on, and though it’s hard to believe, she is back in politics.

Her title now? Congresswoman. She celebrates her birthdays at the Sofitel, where tears stream down her face but fail to wash away her woes – or her sins. Her audience includes friends and foes alike.

From this fairy tale we can conclude that Fortune is perennially drunk, and favours anyone who dances along in a frock, whether rich, bad, pretty, corrupt, indifferent, or simply blessed with incomprehensible luck. The favoured get to declare their happily-ever-afters to generations and generations of children wanting a story at bedtime.

With no less a personage than Pope Paul VI, Imelda shared this profoundly personal insight: ‘God is love. I have loved. Therefore, I will go to heaven.’

You know you’ve made it when you can write your own ending.

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Extract from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Reloaded, published

by Campfire Books, India.

Jéanpaul Ferro

Yodok 15

Men and women in the snowy fields picking cabbage with your naked hands, faces stricken riding your colourless uniforms your naked souls gone a long time ago nothing to eat today or tomorrow – who are you then?

You know the warm-coated guards shoot prisoners with their rifles in the absolute controlled area

surrounded by electrified wire minefields snare pits

inside:

1. factionalist elements 2. reactionaries 3. anti-revolutionaries 4. capitalists 5. landowners 6. pro-Japanese 7. pro-American 8. pro-Chinese 126

Jéanpaul Ferro

9. religionists 10. traitors to the nation –

they will never leave once they have set foot inside the walls of Yodok 15 or Onsong 13 or Hoeyong-ri 22

and the world does nothing.

Yodok 15, Onsong 13 and Hoeyong-ri 22 are names of concentration camps in North Korea.

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Poetry

Dreams of Men

The sky in North Korea always leads to China dark during the day, bright plutonium yellow at night dogs sell human body parts along the country roads here humans cut off other humans’ legs in the camps there is neither a half full nor a half empty glass there is neither a half full nor a half empty soul everyone knows the day they are going to die in North Korea there is torture and a life sentence in the political prisons for when you are caught (it does not matter for what) you have a 5-foot-by-5-foot underground cell you are hit, you are raped, you are tortured you creep, you crawl, and you cower you are crushed, you are experimented on you are rushed off your feet by freezing water you are poisoned, starved, gassed, you are cut up you are told your dead children’s names over and over.

I smashed my fingertips so they would kill me, but they laughed at me for three and a half years instead I huddled in the corner all night and tried to dream – dream of my fingertips touching the wet sands of the ocean dream of the bright garden stars rising out in the backyard dream of your hips with cinnamon and parsley dream of your body rising sunward like a blue sunflower dream of flying south over the distant mountain tops to die together in a beautiful peace.

128

North Korea: Absolute Power and Absolute Corruption Jang Jin-sung translated by Shirley Lee

S

ystemic flaws and inherent corruption have prevented North Korea from fulfilling the promise of its juche ideology of self-reliance. Following the collapse of its strongest ally, the Soviet Union, these flaws became more apparent. Without Soviet support, corruption – once the fiefdom of the elite – began to filter down to all levels of society. A catastrophic effect of this was the failure of North Korea’s official rationing system. This occurred in 1994 as a result of political instability brought about by President Kim Il-sung’s death, economic free-fall after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the consequent breakdown of law and order. The people had depended on the rationing system, and its failure fatally undermined their loyalty to the party.

All North Koreans were divided into classes and granted rations according to their loyalty to the Kim family and the regime. According to their class, people were entitled to receive ‘everyday rations’, ‘three-day rations’, ‘weekly rations’ or ‘monthly rations’. When the government stopped the general distribution of rations in 1994 , mass starvation decimated the population. It is widely thought that up to two million – and perhaps more – died in the famine, though there is no way of confirming the number of deaths.

At the same time, monthly rations were abolished. The provision of weekly rations to mid-ranking officials was delegated to each department 129

North Korea: Absolute Power and Absolute Corruption

that employed these officials. Consequently, only the groups entitled to everyday rations and three-day rations – the most privileged members of society – continued to receive regular food supplies.

An everyday ration was calculated according to the number of calories required daily for one person, multiplied by the number of members in a family. These were provided to central party secretaries, departmental directors and deputies, ministers, military personnel ranked commander and above, and those working in close proximity to the ruling Kim, such as his bodyguards. Three-day rations were for central party deputies, managers and deputy ministers. The most coveted ‘ration’, though, was a gift from Kim Jong-il, often including foreign luxury goods not otherwise obtainable on the domestic market.

The collapse of rationing in 1994 saw a corresponding expansion of the black market, which compelled North Koreans to obtain goods according to the forces of supply and demand. Foreign goods, even luxury items, began to circulate, making the Kims’ system of ‘loyalty gifts’ obsolete. The obeisant and privileged classes began to be rewarded instead with valuable foreign currency, which in turn led to the beginning of financial corruption in North Korea.

Black markets began to appear overnight, and their unregulated business offered a new avenue for corruption.

On 1 July 2000 the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) announced its ‘ 7.1 Policy’, through which the value of goods would be officially determined ‘according to market forces’. This was an effort to regain control of the economy and reassert the authority of the dictatorship.

Before this, there had been no notion of inflation, given that the regime determined the value of goods. However, since the planned economy had collapsed, the regime had no option but to turn a blind eye to the black markets.

The 7.1 Policy was ineffective; it only exposed the widening disparity between the official ‘market’ prices and actual values. While the policy remains in force, the gap between values is exploited. And because the framework is patchy, there are economic loopholes exploited by those with money or power.

The situation is aggravated by the fact that the regime has not been consistent in adhering to its own economic regulations and has often changed 130

Jang Jin-sung

its line. North Koreans have lost confidence in the law and in other frameworks set up by the regime, and have come to rely on the abuse of political privileges and the use of illegal markets for basic subsistence. The North Korean people have adapted quickly to this new order and their fundamental worldview has started to shift. In the past, North Koreans knew only the value of loyalty as it related to the rigid system of rewards. However, North Koreans are now growing accustomed to the ‘new’ system of market forces, of supply and demand, and are coming to understand that goods have value outside what is dictated by the regime.

This transformation goes hand in hand with an increasing awareness of the idea of fending for oneself, rather than working for the collective good. The disparity between the people’s revised mindset and the official line creates a vacuum that corruption has readily filled. As goods become valuable, the traditional system of fealty to the regime and reward from the regime becomes redundant, and society spirals into economic anarchy, especially as individual survival cannot be assured within the sanctioned framework.

The future of the current regime requires the continued deification of the Kim family and its dispensation of political privileges; thus, corruption is sustained, at least to the extent that it benefits the elite. To maintain political, if not economic, stability, the dictator must allow power to trickle down to his relatives and close associates: the power structure in the DPRK is held together by personal relationships rather than by an abstract or legal framework. In other words, the abuse of power, such as granting positions to family members, is the rule rather than the exception. This form of corruption is no longer restricted to the higher echelons, In the past, a loyal citizen could aspire to become a privileged member of the ruling Workers’ Party, to obtain a better job or to acquire the right to live within Pyongyang’s city limits. These were the incentives to remain loyal to the state. Recently, however, financial wealth has become both the basis of power and the method of reward, because money guarantees a comfortable life, and political loyalty alone does not. It is significant that today North Korea’s elite perceives the acquisition of personal wealth as a better route to power than mere loyalty to the regime.

The absence of an independent media in the DPRK ensures that corruption, in all its forms, goes unreported. The media follow the diktat of 131

North Korea: Absolute Power and Absolute Corruption

the Party’s propaganda department, and this is their raison d’être. Lack of press freedom actively facilitates North Korea’s endemic corruption.

There is an entity called ‘Channel 3’ which purportedly monitors corruption; in reality this is another means by which the Party’s propaganda machine retains far-reaching control over society. Channel 3 serves a regime that not only prohibits press freedom, but also silences any sentiment perceived to be negative. Corruption thrives in an atmosphere where it is permissible to express no opinion other than that endorsed by the Party.

Corruption also thrives in other forms and at different levels in North Korean society. It occurs on the individual level when officials abuse their public power for private gain, or conduct personal activities in the name of the state. The most common such abuse is the arrangement of job transfers, promotions or foreign postings, usually in exchange for a bribe. Bribery is the most common form of corruption; nearly all punishments and purges in the higher echelons are the direct consequence of bribery cases gone wrong.

Embezzlement is also very common, with the proceeds routed abroad.

After the collapse of the state’s planned economy and the consequent depletion of its resources, government departments were stripped of the civic duties and responsibilities for which they were established. This fuelled the growth of corruption at a systemic level. Officials began seeking every opportunity to earn money, including foreign currency, in the name of the state department they worked for. These officials at least have an excuse for their illegal activities: they are trying to feed their employees.

Yet with each government department merely looking after its own, civil servants come to resemble organized criminal gangs, and have no incentive to act in the public interest.

The DPRK continues to be run by carrot-and-stick policies, with loyalty to the regime the standard of virtue. This results in severe socio-economic disparities between the shrinking ‘loyal’ classes and the overwhelming majority deemed ‘corrupt’, which includes those judged ‘guilty’ because of their family background. In any event, all laws become irrelevant in the face of the omnipotent divinity of the Kim household. The laws of North Korea are corrupt in that they are executed according to double standards; and the law is invalidated altogether when it concerns Kim or his orders.

Perhaps most insidious of all is the fact that the corruption of North Korea is not contained within its borders; it also affects the international 132

Jang Jin-sung

community. North Korea continues to be a major exporter of drugs such as heroin and amphetamines; it is a leader in the field of human trafficking and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of counterfeit banknotes.

The country’s laws do not protect ordinary North Koreans, who are therefore vulnerable both to becoming victims of crime and succumbing to its temptations. The fundamental corruption of the DPRK regime denies North Koreans a framework that would allow them to sustain their livelihoods within the law. It is therefore not surprising that in order to survive, many people have no choice but to engage fully with the world of crime and corruption that surrounds them.

133

Changming Yuan

Y You love ‘Y’, not because it’s the first letter In your family name, but because it’s like A horn, which the water buffalo in your Native village used to fight against injustice Or, because it’s like a twig, where a crow Can come down to perch, a cicada can sing Towards the setting sun as loud as it wants to More important, it’s like a real reed deeply rooted On the bank of the Nile, something you can bend Into a whistle or hit a drum with; in pronouncing it You can get all the answers you need. Besides You can make it into a heart-felt catapult And shoot at a snakehead or sparrow, as long As it is within the range of your boyhood

134

Interview: Wang Xiaofang Shu-Ching Jean Chen

C

orruption is widely acknowledged as a serious, and endemic issue in China. Yet only occasionally – when big cases such as that of former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, or news of the extraordinary wealth accumulated by the family of Premier Wen Jiabao, come to light – is the public provided with a glimpse into the rarefied world of corrupt, elite officials. Only an insider could divulge the best-kept secrets of China’s power-centred bureaucracy. That’s why the thirteen novels of former official Wang Xiaofang have caused such a stir since the first, The Deadly Vortex, was published in 2003. His bestselling book, The Beijing Representative, has sold more than one million copies.

Wang has first-hand experience of corruption on a grand scale. In the late 1990s he served as private secretary to Shenyang Deputy Mayor Ma Xiangdong, who was convicted in 2001 of squandering over US$3.6 million 147

Interview: Wang Xiaofang

of public money in the casinos of Macau, and executed by lethal injection.

Wang was also investigated. He was cleared of wrongdoing but decided an official’s life was not for him and took up writing instead.

Wang was in Hong Kong recently to promote The Civil Servant’s Notebook, his first work to be translated and published in English. This was his first public appearance outside mainland China. Unlike the characters in his book, who reveal their innermost thoughts with surprising candour, Wang was restrained, a bit nervous and unsure of how much he could share with a foreign audience. This was understandable, especially since the period leading up to the November 2012 Communist Party Congress is considered especially ‘sensitive’ – in other words, a time to avoid provocative statements – and he is currently under an implicit publishing ban.

Nevertheless, Wang shared the following insights into his work.

How closely does The Civil Servant’s Notebook reflect your own experience as a civil servant in Shenyang?

Fiction is the portrayal of life through imaginary characters. I can only say I drew my inspiration from real life. My characters are portraits of typical people; they portray not only their appearances and their actions, but also their souls.

Do you think the kind of interpersonal relations, infighting and corruption you write about are widespread in China’s civil service?

I reveal the details of the official-centred system in which bureaucrats wield absolute power. The Chinese have inherited a bureaucratic system that has evolved through the centuries; pandering to power is a habit that is hard to kick and has attained a status akin to indigenous religion. It’s very difficult to convert the faithful.

Why are your works of political fiction so popular among Chinese readers?

I pour my life and my soul into my books. My works have been well received because they take the pulse of our times. They are based on real stories that could only happen in China. They strike at the heart of reality in Chinese society; that is, the worship of absolute power as a result of the bureaucratdominated system.

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Shu-Ching Jean Chen

Do you hope to affect the culture of government officials by exposing its current flaws?

The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa said, ‘Literature is fire. It doesn’t follow the conventions, doesn’t cave in; the reason for a writer’s existence is to protest, to oppose, to critique.’ I think critical writers are the conscience of society. I question the value of any writer or artist who can ignore the dark forces around him. If writers and artists refused to speak out against the darkness around them, literature and art would be silenced, and then the whole world would be silenced. God would be silenced too.

You have already written additional novels that you cannot get published at present, despite the success of your previous work. Why is this? How does the censorship system work?

The publishers have their own criteria to evaluate a book’s political risk.

Most of my books have been published; a few are pending publication because of the current political environment.

Have you seen any improvements in official culture since you started writing?

In China the history of bureaucracy is too long, the intrigue too deep, the behind-the-scenes story too dark, the manipulation too varied. As long as the system as a whole does not change, it will be very difficult to resolve endemic corruption.

I think there are two kinds of corrupt elements. The first kind would behave properly if the system had checks and balances. The second would be corrupt even under a good system. The majority in China today are the former. In The Civil Servant’s Notebook, the corrupt official Peng Guoliang is the first kind.

Before he is executed, a reporter visits him and he describes himself as a victim of the system. I have expressed this idea in several of my books.

Cleaning up corruption cannot rely on personal discipline alone. No one is made of special material. Unless the system is reformed, there will be one corrupt element after another.

How do you view the Bo Xilai case?

The Bo Xilai incident is another warning of the urgent imperative to reform the political system.

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Interview: Wang Xiaofang

You said you have a sense of being ‘chosen’ to expose corruption. How did you come to adopt this belief?

Since the day I started to write fiction, I have submerged myself in fiction.

Literature is my religion, my belief and my spiritual home. The way religion saves its followers, literature has saved me.

How do you feel about your contemporary, Mo Yan, receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature? Do you think his style is unique and outstanding among Chinese writers?

The well-known Chinese critic Zhu Dake has stated that the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez has had the strongest influence on all contemporary Chinese writers, but few would be willing to acknowledge their debt to his linguistic style. He points out that, for many Chinese writers, not only does Márquez present an insurmountable barrier, he is also a deeply hidden secret. Mo Yan’s magical novels about his hometown, Gaomi, reflect the signature style of Márquez.

The basic principle of art is creativity. That’s why I invented my own style, with multiple perspectives and a complex, non-linear narrative. The biggest risk in writing fiction comes from self-imposed limitations within your own mind. In China, the mainstream is dominated by convention. Because of our dated literary concepts and lack of insight, even if a great novel ahead of its time appeared in the market, we probably wouldn’t recognize it.

The Civil Servant’s Notebook is published by Penguin.

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Changming Yuan

A Concise History of China in English 1. Ancient China They used to drink tea Wear silk Eat from china Think in terms of Zen And practise Confucianism Only – is it true?

2. Semi-Colonial China Wearing cheongsam These poor coolies arrived here On sampans Always ready to kowtow To a tycoon Who lived in Shangri-La Eating dim sum Drinking oolong Playing mahjong Gambling in a casino every day Though reluctant to give cumshaw

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Poetry

3. Mandarin China Led by dao A yin Running dog Wearing qipao Is fighting against a yang Paper tiger With wushu After getting brainwashed Through maotai Like a taikongnaut At a fengshui spot Dominated by qi

152

Ma Yan translated by Catherine Platt

Spoken Word I open my mouth and speak and it means something. but someone is watching my mouth ears moving up and down vigilant, a large grey wolf.

A breath of wind stirs his ears like the plucking of strings, a musical sense sets his ears moving.

Moving left, moving right a playful fan fluttering.

So I open my mouth to speak – and close it – and open it again.

My tonsils shift, my uvula shakes – a shame nobody understands I don’t understand myself.

Sometimes I actually sing 176

Ma Yan

a burbling kind of song, sometimes with a melody like a popular tune on the radio, but sometimes tuneless like a wailing ghost.

Nobody hears me sing.

Understanding isn’t what I mean so I sing secretly, sing when no one is there on moonless nights, to empty streets I sing, and if someone comes by I stop.

Even a cough has meaning issued from the mouth – the loud hack of an old man the thin yelp of a puppy.

So, speaking, I say, I cough once to show I’m in earnest.

But the thing about speaking, there is this problem with it, which is, in fact, the speaking – it’s the speaking aloud.

His eyes flickering dimly the grey wolf slinks away, his ears upright now unmoving, his receding back 177

Poetry

monumental as if carved from stone, his pointed ears sharp against the sky.

I don’t make a sound not a breath, silent, looking left, looking right.

I try a small gulp – no response, – no one speaks to me.

Fine, I will sing then.

I won’t say a word.

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Alisha Haridasani

F

rom 14 February 1989 onwards, Salman Rushdie did not receive his post directly. Instead, every letter or invitation went to his agency, where it was screened and tested for explosives before a member of his protection team would pick it up and take it to him. When a cleaner, plumber or farmer happened by one of his various temporary houses, Rushdie had to hide behind kitchen counters, in bathrooms, in the garage. Visiting his son Zafar, then just ten years old, involved a process known as ‘dry-cleaning’ to ensure he was not being followed, and consisted of driving ‘as weirdly as possible’.

Thus was the life of the author in hiding, from the moment Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination for writing The Satanic Verses, which managed to turn the mundane acts of Rushdie’s life into security threats, and profound events into surreal occurrences.

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Review: Joseph Anton

Joseph Anton, a portmanteau of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, was the alias Rushdie chose to hide behind while living under the threat of the fatwa. The memoir looks at the author’s life through the lens of hindsight in order to paint a clear picture of a time that was both messy and blurry, its confusion compounded by the constant noise of fiery voices speaking for or against him from all corners of the globe. Readers are given a glimpse into Rushdie’s pre-fatwa life: the dynamics of his family, his childhood migration from Bombay to London, his years of education at Rugby and Cambridge, his struggles as an aspiring writer, his loves, his insecurities, the way he was catapulted to success after writing Midnight’s Children. Then comes the period in the shadow of the fatwa during which everything he knew, or at least thought he knew, was turned upside down.

The story is delivered in true Rushdie fashion, skipping back and forth between the main narrative, flashbacks, and cryptic foreshadowing that any Rushdie aficionado would expect. Inevitably and necessarily, Joseph Anton explores the themes of liberty, religion and secularism. Rushdie’s battle against numerous oppressors over a work of literature is a microcosm of what was happening on a global scale, when echoes of the struggle between tyranny and freedom could be heard everywhere. While Rushdie was resisting calls to withdraw The Satanic Verses and pushing for a lifting of the fatwa, dozens – or perhaps hundreds – of Chinese citizens were crushed in Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall crumbled, Ayatollah Khomeini died (though his fatwa lived on) and Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

Rushdie’s struggles, however, were complicated by the unexpected violence and controversy triggered by The Satanic Verses: bookshops were bombed and fatal riots exploded around the world. The lives of British and American hostages in Lebanon were at stake while the lives of the people closest to Rushdie were in constant danger. Many people felt the author should simply withdraw the book and apologise, instead of letting the consequences of publication snowball out of control.

But he had done nothing that warranted an apology. As John Stuart Mill, an ardent supporter of free speech, put it, an author’s right to publish an ‘opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor’ should be protected, whereas the same opinion would merit punishment when ‘delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer’ because it then becomes ‘a positive instigation to some mischievous act.’ Though The 180

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Satanic Verses may have been seen as blasphemy, it was Rushdie’s opponents who were exciting an already agitated mob before the house of the author.

Their reactions and the harm caused to Rushdie and others were far more damaging than the book itself.

Rushdie responded to the criticism against him in his speech, Is Nothing Sacred?, delivered at the annual memorial lecture for Herbert Read in 1990.

He described literature as ‘the stage upon which the great debates of society can be conducted’. A book is one voice, among many others, about the times we live in. It can be controversial, blasphemous or outrageous but it should not be silenced because, as Rushdie pointed out, ‘Wherever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or later the walls have come tumbling down.’

Joseph Anton sheds as much light on Rushdie’s personal life, his mindset and his intelligence as it does on the global context of the fatwa. He provides elaborate details about the characters in his life, the feelings he was experiencing and the memories he held on to (amid a lot of name dropping). At times the reader cannot help but feel like Padma in Midnight’s Children, begging Rushdie to return to ‘the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next’. However, these details are what anchor his life in reality, and give context to the impact of the fatwa, reminding the reader that the man buried under the controversy had once led a ‘normal life’.

The intricate detail also gives the reader glimpses of where Rushdie finds his inspiration and the chrysalises from which his ideas emerge. For example, description of his first wife Clarissa is immediately reminiscent of Pamela Lovelace in The Satanic Verses. His childhood experiences at Rugby and his relationship with his father correlate with the life of Saladin Chamcha, also in The Satanic Verses. We see where Haroun and the Sea of Stories started and where he met Shalimar the Clown. It is through Joseph Anton that the reader begins to realize just how much of himself Rushdie pours into his works.

Another important element of the book is that it is written in the third person; to Rushdie the entire debacle felt so surreal that it almost seemed as though it were happening to someone else. For a long time, he found himself viewing his own life through the headlines, which treated him not as an individual but as the face of the issue itself: ‘He was the person in the 181

Review: Joseph Anton

eye of the storm, no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of Satanic Verses,’ he explains.

Joseph Anton is a remarkable book about a man caught in the middle of a global battlefield, whose love for literature and faith in freedom gave him the hope and courage to pull through his trying experience. There is also a historical undercurrent to the book; the attack on Salman Rushdie was just the beginning of a string of similar events that continue to this day. In fact, the release of his book in September this year coincided with new riots in the Muslim world ignited by the publication of an anti-Islamic video.

Hence, the conversation continues.

Joseph Anton is published by Random House.

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Kelly Falconer

T

he subtitle of this book is ‘Hong Jun Investigates’, and it’s one of four in a series starring the same protagonist, a lawyer who has returned to Beijing after spending several years studying and working in America. It is the mid-1990s, and his status is assured in a post-Maoist society respectful of his foreign education and fascinated by his experience of the West, specifically America.

An idealist, Hong Jun sets up his own practice to deal with criminal cases for ordinary citizens, rather than with more lucrative commercial work. The tale begins with Hong Jun’s back story, but it soon takes off on a narrative archetypical of Western crime fiction: on a slow day at the office, 183

Review: Hanging Devils

a client walks in with the promise of a huge case paying loads of money, and everything follows from there. In Hanging Devils the client, Jianzhong, has a brother, Jianguo, who has been in prison for ten years for a murder he didn’t commit, or so says Jianzhong. The case interests Hong Jun in part because of the slightly sleazy brother, Jianzhong, who is an unashamedly wealthy product of the new get-rich-quick China, where corruption is the name of the game. Jianzhong is a suitable foil for our incorruptible and upstanding lawyer, Hong Jun, who wonders why Jianguo signed a confession of guilt instead of protesting his innocence.

The murder took place ten years before, on a state farm in the north-eastern region of China near Harbin. Hong Jun travels back and forth between the sophisticated city of Beijing and the frozen northern farmland, and back and forth in time between 1984 and 1994. The contrasts provide a sense of the cultural and political changes taking place at the time. The tensions between old and new, between political ambition and the rule of law, and between desire and restraint heighten the suspense and intrigue. The humanity of each character, even the guilty ones, is portrayed sympathetically, and this makes the outcome more complex. The victim, Li Hongmei, a beautiful, kind-hearted young girl, was a neighbour’s daughter with whom Jianguo had been in love. She had politely rejected him in favour of someone else, a boy she had been seeing in secret. Jianguo did the gentlemanly thing and stepped aside, not without a broken heart, but after her death rumours spread that he had killed her in revenge.

Hong Jun had been the type of child who ‘loved puzzles and mathematics problems, the harder the better’ and he now relishes the challenge of proving the identity of the real killer: ‘A crime had been committed, and someone had to be punished. It was all about balance and harmony.’ There are several suspects. One is the boyfriend, Xiao Xiong, who ‘was allegedly connected with the democracy movement back then’ and could have killed Hongmei ‘if she was a witness to, or an unwitting collaborator in his activities . . .

He had means, motive and opportunity’ and disappeared after the murder, never to be seen again. But was Xiong running from guilt, or to hide from local government officials who had been skulking around the farm hoping to smoke him out?

Ten years later these same officials have risen to positions of higher authority – one of them is the chief of the Criminal Investigation Unit; the 184

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other is now party secretary. Their official roles require them to welcome important visitors to the town and they accord Hong Jun considerable respect. Hong Jun duly uses his status to persuade the officials to help him; nevertheless, he maintains his air of unimpeachable moral probity while slowly unravelling a cover-up, a miscarriage of justice and a wrongful conviction.

The author, like his main character, was educated and worked in America before moving back to China, where he is professor of law at Beijing’s prestigious People’s University. Although fluent in English, he writes his novels in Chinese. The spot-on, classic-crime tone and highly charged atmosphere has benefitted from translator Duncan Hewitt’s background as a journalist working in China.

I asked Professor He if he had read much Western crime fiction when he was studying law in Chicago. ‘I didn’t have time,’ he said. ‘It took me one year, rather than three, to complete my degree (a doctorate in law).’ As a child of the Cultural Revolution, ‘I didn’t have modern fiction available when I was growing up, but we did have Arthur Conan Doyle, which I read a lot of.’

The influence is clear, but He’s style could easily be compared to other crime writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and J. M. Cain – classic, but with an enjoyably modern, Chinese twist. He had wanted to write a novel with a detective as the main character but at that time in China there was no such thing. The first detective agency, says Professor He, opened its doors in 1992, was shut down a year later and resurfaced under the alternative title ‘investigation service’.

Professor He’s research interests include comparative criminal justice systems, criminal investigation and criminal procedures; his expertise makes his novels all the more believable and thought-provoking. When asked recently about corruption in China, the professor remarked on the number of university courses available now that conflate politics and law, which he insists should be separate. ‘With politics,’ says Professor He, ‘it’s win or lose; with law, it’s right or wrong. In China,’ he adds, ‘the political struggle does not only mean win or lose, but also life or death.’

Hanging Devils is published by Penguin.

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Kathleen Hwang

C

heap labour is a key component of competitiveness for companies striving to make a profit in today’s global market. Yet, as Siddharth Kara points out in Bonded Labor, it is too often an excuse for exploitation.

When a US or European company cuts a deal with a South Asian company to buy tea or carpets, for instance, how much does it know about the people at the lowest level of the supply chain, about the hands that picked the tea leaves or painstakingly knotted the carpet?

Kara takes us to the fields, quarries, huts and kilns of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal for a direct look at the face of modern-day slavery.

He describes malnourished women picking tea leaves in oppressive heat and given little water and no food for fourteen-hour shifts; and scrawny children hunched for long hours over looms in dimly lit shacks. He recounts 186

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the tales of men, women and children so poor they have no alternative but to bond themselves to those who own the land and the resources around them. They surrender their freedom for food and shelter because they have no reasonable alternative.

Kara calculates that there are 18 to 20.5 million bonded labourers in the world, with at least 84 per cent of these in South Asia. Their plight begins with the acceptance of an advance payment, or the provision of food and shelter, for which they sign over their labour for a season, or a year, or a lifetime. They are often recruited by go-betweens who keep records of their debts, which in many cases seem only to grow, never diminish. Illiterate and unschooled, the workers rarely challenge their overseers, especially as doing so may result in eviction or violence against them, or their families.

In addition to producing saleable goods, bonded labourers help build modern infrastructure and facilities for the upper and middle classes of their societies – while themselves living on construction sites or roadsides without proper shelter, toilet facilities, clean water or adequate food. These construction workers are generally trafficked from poor rural areas, and lured by the promise of opportunity in the cities. Kara quotes an Indian woman named Rashmi, interviewed at a huge construction site in the new urban township of Navi Mumbai, where her entire family was working as bonded labourers: We are treated like cockroaches . . . We are like dogs in the street scrounging for food and shelter. They promise us wages, but we have been here five months with no wages and barely enough food to eat.

I feel no human dignity. Every week I go to Taloje Creek and pray for the day my life will end.

Bonded workers live at the bottom of society; almost all belong to ‘untouchable’ castes or minority groups. Kara outlines the history of the caste system that has persisted in South Asia for centuries, the slave trade that thrived in colonial times, and the system of bonded labour that arose as an alternative to slavery when it was generally outlawed in the nineteenth century. He points out that the exploitative bonded-labour system is now illegal in India, Pakistan and Nepal, yet persists with impunity. He describes India’s laws and policies aimed at eradicating bonded labour as ‘passionate and intelligent’ but adds that ‘laws – even if perfectly designed – only go so 187

Review: Bonded Labor

far as the will to enforce them.’ Bonded labour, he says, ‘is a form of slavery that is perpetuated by custom, corruption, greed and social apathy.’

Kara spent eleven years investigating the exploitation of South Asia’s underclasses. Bonded Labor builds on the meticulous research he used for his first book, Sex Trafficking, which is considered one of the most authoritative studies on the sex trade. He includes this unscrupulous business in his statistics for bonded labour, since its victims are often deprived of liberty and forced to work to pay off ‘debts’ incurred for their transport and basic sustenance.

In 2011 bonded labour produced an estimated US$17.6 billion in profits worldwide. Yet despite this huge figure, Kara points out that the system is inefficient and unproductive for everyone except the exploiters. Total output is less than it would be if free and fair market forces prevailed: workers paid decent wages are more productive than those who are undernourished and unmotivated. The system encourages human rights abuses and flouting of the law, and reinforces the outmoded notion that low-caste groups are not entitled to protections and opportunities that other citizens take for granted.

Kara concludes his book with recommendations for legal, economic and educational reforms that would render bonded labour obsolete.

This book is a valuable resource for policy makers, human-rights activists, legal experts and academics, as well as for businesses with supply chains in developing countries. It deserves attention, and should inspire the eradication of the insidious crime of enslavement.

Bonded Labor is published by Columbia University Press.

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Ilyas Khan and Gore Vidal with the manuscript of the new introduction to his 1965 revision of The City and the Pillar.

London, 2010.

Remembering a Friend of the Review – Gore Vidal Ilyas Khan

M

y friend Gore Vidal, who died this summer, was a writer whose acerbic wit, perhaps exemplified in his autobiography, Palimpsest, will be celebrated for a very long time. Vidal really did know everyone who was anyone after the Second World War, and he is rightly celebrated as the greatest essayist of his times. ‘The last of the greatest American Generation has died’, ran one typical obituary header, and his literary executor (and our mutual friend) Jay Parini wrote in the Daily Telegraph that ‘few doubt he was a great American essayist, a worthy successor to Emerson and Twain in this neglected genre’.

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Remembering a Friend of the Review – Gore Vidal

Vidal was in many ways the epitome of the learned man; an enthusiastic autodidact, his conversations would range in topic from the classics of Western literature to the concepts of Eastern philosophy. He could entertain for hours with tales about each and every American president. He would speak of Kennedy with ambiguous warmth, of Nixon with special and comic scorn, Bush Senior with puzzled amusement, Bush Junior with absolute and abiding distaste, and Clinton with surprising commendation. I remember one late evening especially: it was after he had spoken in Westminster about the importance of Cuba. Still on form in the early hours, he dexterously and captivatingly analysed the Roman Republic with a flourish suitable to any Cambridge don.

When I took over the Asia Literary Review, he provided me with advice and guidance as relevant as it was peremptory. It went something like this: ‘You’ll know when you lose interest, and when that day arrives you’d better close up shop or, if you can’t sell it, give the magazine away.’

Delivered with his usual pomp and majesty, the pronouncement came at the end of yet another memorable evening, this one spent on the terrace of his home in the Hollywood hills and on the back end of continuous rounds of whiskey that had begun some ten hours earlier. I felt privileged and lucky to spend time like this with Vidal, with each occasion surpassing the last.

I grew to admire him, and to hold a deep affection for him, too. The last time I saw him I’d sat down on one of his overstuffed armchairs. Next to me was the typescript for A Streetcar Named Desire. Vidal had known Tennessee Williams well, and the script, complete with handwritten edits, had been a gift to Vidal from Williams. Most of Vidal’s house was given over to books, and treasures such as this were overflowing from the shelves.

It has taken me a long time to get over the breathless and at times embarrassingly cloying adolescent intellectual crush that accompanied my initial meetings with Vidal. I knew, and have witnessed, his ability to reduce people to shivering wrecks with a few hard-hitting words, an aspect of his character highlighted in a number of column inches published about him. However, his support for the Review during its launch period, and his warmth towards me, and my wife, Mara, reserved a place for him in my heart. I miss him.

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Contributors GOPILAL ACHARYA was born in Gelephu, Bhutan, in 1978, and educated in Bhutan and Sweden. He is the author of Bhutanese Folk Tales (from the east and the south) and Dancing to Death (an anthology of poems). His debut novel, With a Stone in My Heart, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize.

His poems have appeared in a number of international anthologies including The Quest, Blossoms and Rustling Breeze.

AUDRA ANG grew up in Singapore and was a Beijing-based correspondent for The Associated Press from 2002 through 2009. In between meals of ‘saliva chicken’ and ‘fragrant and spicy potato shreds’, she covered disasters, disease and dissent while chronicling the breakneck changes that were convulsing China.

Ang also reported from North Korea, Mongolia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. She is the author of To the People, Food is Heaven.

PROSPER ANYALECHI is a nightlife worker in Tokyo’s Roppongi neighbourhood. He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Enugu State University of Science and Technology in Nigeria. His poetry has been published in a number of underground expatriate publications in Tokyo. He lives in Saitama with his wife and two children.

JOHN WALL BARGER is a Canadian poet living in Hong Kong. His poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry 2008 and The Montreal Prize Global Poetry Anthology. His second collection, Hummingbird, was published in spring 2012.

F. H. BATACAN is a Filipino journalist and crime-fiction writer. She worked for nearly a decade in the Philippine intelligence community before moving into broadcast journalism. Her first novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles, won the Grand Prize for the English Novel in the 1999 Palanca Awards, as well as the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award and the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award. She has just finished a collection of short stories and is working on her second novel.

TEW BUNNAG was born in Bangkok and educated in the UK, where he studied Chinese and economics at Cambridge University. His fiction deals with modern life in Thailand and explores the tension between traditional values and the rise of aggressive consumerism. He draws on his experiences working for the Human Development Foundation – an NGO based in Bangkok’s largest slum – of which he is a board member.

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JOHN BURDETT has spent more than half his life in South East Asia, where he first worked as a lawyer in government and private practice in Hong Kong. After retiring from law he fulfilled a lifelong ambition to write novels.

Burdett is the bestselling author of Bangkok 8 and its sequels, Bangkok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunts and The Godfather of Kathmandu. His most recent novel in this series, Vulture Peak, was released in January 2012. He now divides his time between Bangkok and south-west France.

SHU-CHING JEAN CHEN is a contributing writer for Forbes Asia. She also writes regular news analyses for the Business Times in Singapore. She was formerly managing editor of CFO, published by The Economist Group, and a staff writer at Forbes. A native of Taiwan, she has covered China for more than a decade.

CHI WEI-JAN is a Taiwanese essayist and playwright. A university professor, he holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Iowa. Private Eyes, his first novel, was a publishing sensation when it came out in 2011, winning almost every major literary award in Taiwan that year. His plays include MIT: Mad in Taiwan, The Mahjong Game Trilogy, and One Bed, Four Players.

JÉANPAUL FERRO is a novelist and poet. He has been nominated eight times for a Pushcart Prize, his work has been featured on NPR, Columbia Review, Connecticut Review, Contemporary American Voices, Hawaii Review, and others.

His published works include All the Good Promises; Becoming X; You Know Too Much about Flying Saucers; Hemispheres; Essendo Morti, nominated for the 2010 Griffin Prize in Poetry; and Jazz, nominated for both the 2012 Griffin Prize in Poetry and the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Prize in Poetry.

LUIS H. FRANCIA is the author of the memoir, Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago, and of A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos.

His poetry collections include The Beauty of Ghosts, Museum of Absences and The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems. He writes an online column for the Philippine Daily Inquirer and teaches at New York University, Hunter College and the City University of Hong Kong.

ALISHA HARIDASANI was raised in Hong Kong before setting off to pursue a BA in journalism and psychology at City University, London. She has worked for Business Traveller Asia-Pacific magazine and is currently working as a freelance journalist in Hong Kong, where she covers a wide range of topics including her favourites: art and culture. You can follow her blog on www.olooblog.com.

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Contributors

HARRY HARRISON always wanted to be a freelance cartoonist when he grew up but now realizes that just growing up would be something of an achievement. While he waits for this to happen, he is a cartoonist for the South China Morning Post and works as a book illustrator.

HE JIAHONG is a professor of law at People’s University in Beijing, and director of law at the Evidence Research Institute. He previously worked as deputy director of the Department for Anti-Dereliction of Duty and Infringement on Human Rights. In 2008 he published a series of essays, An Amnesty for Corrupt Officials, which stirred widespread debate. He has written five crime thrillers including Hanging Devils, recently published in English by Penguin.

ANNA HOLMWOOD translates literature from Chinese and Swedish to English. She was awarded a British Centre for Literary Translation mentorship award in 2010 and has since translated two novels and countless short stories for publication. In 2012 she co-founded the Emerging Translators’ Network to support early career translators. She also works as a literary agent specialising in promoting Chinese literature abroad.

BRIAN HOLTON is a prize-winning translator and poet who took up teaching to fund his translation habit, but has now retired to work full-time on translating Chinese literature. He has translated fifteen books of poetry, and published translations, poems and short stories in his native Scots and in English. He is best known as the principal translator of the poet Yang Lian.

JANG JIN-SUNG worked as a writer for the Workers’ Party and earned special recognition from Kim Jong-il for his poetry. In 2004 he defected to South Korea. He has since published a collection of poems, I Am Selling My Daughter for 100 Won, and a memoir describing his escape from North Korea, Crossing the Tumen River with Poetry in My Heart. He represented North Korea at the Cultural Olympiad in London in 2012 and is an Honorary Fellow of the Asia Pacific Writers’ and Translators’ Association.

SHIRLEY LEE is a composer and musician with a degree in classics and Persian from Oxford University. She has read at London 2012’s Poetry Parnassus, and at the Hong Kong and Orient-Occident International Literary Festivals. Her poetry and translations have been published in various journals and anthologies.

She is the editor of newfocusintl.com, which publishes primary-source information from and about the DPRK. She is working on two books and is a founding director of the Asia Pacific Writers’ and Translators’ Association.

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MA YAN was born in Chengdu in 1979 and graduated from Beijing University. A novelist, critic, editor and organizer of literary festivals and events, she also worked as editor of and contributor to Felicity Troup. Her poetry has been published in Today, Foreign Literature, Big River South North, Book City, Chinese Poetry Criticism, Southern Weekend, Shanghai Culture, Limits and In Chengdu.

Ma Yan committed suicide on 30 December 2010, in Shanghai.

JAMES MCMATH is a scholar and freelance translator of Chinese. He is based in Beijing, where he works for a legal NGO. His translations have mostly focused on early modern literature, though he periodically ventures into contemporary works on state and society as well. He is actively preoccupied with developing computational tools for the analysis of literary style.

MAI JIA is a former Chinese army cryptologist who became a novelist and scriptwriter. His work includes the spy novels Decoded, The Conspiracy and The Wind’s Voice. His screenplays for the TV series The Conspiracy and the film The Message (based on The Wind’s Voice) have been extremely influential, sparking the current craze for spy stories in China’s TV and film industry.

CARLA CAMILLE L. MENDOZA graduated from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, and has worked as an operating-room nurse. She wrote and produced segments for Life and Style with Ricky Reyes on GMA News TV, assisted in the production of the 33rd Catholic Mass Media Awards, and wrote and produced two books for the UST Medical Alumni Association. She also wrote for the 2012 London Olympics on AKTV. She has recently been accepted into ABS-CBN’s workshop on scriptwriting for TV and film.

REID MITCHELL, from New Orleans, has spent much of his time in Hong Kong and China since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A historian and novelist, he has taught at Jiangnan University in Wuxi and now teaches at Huaqiao University in Quanzhou. Mitchell’s poetry has been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Poetry Macao, Softblow, the Asia Literary Review and elsewhere.

POULOMI MUKHERJEE was born in Jamshedpur, India. Her first stories were published in The Statesman, a national daily newspaper. She worked as an advertising agency copywriter for a few years before becoming a travel writer, which allowed her to indulge her two passions: travelling and writing. Presently, she writes graphic novels, moonlights as an avid travel blogger, and is penning a travel book.

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Contributors

CATHERINE PLATT, originally from the UK, has been based in China’s Sichuan Province since 2004 as a freelance editor, writer, translator and consultant to non-governmental organizations. Her translations of Chinese poetry and fiction have been published in MaLa, the Chengdu Bookworm Literary Review, Chengdoo Magazine and Unshod Quills, and in a forthcoming Anthology of Twentieth Century Chinese Literature to be published by Springer and Yilin Publishing Company.

DREUX RICHARD is an American writer, journalist and literary translator who lives in Tokyo. He covers Japan’s African community for the Japan Times. His work has also appeared, or is forthcoming, in Days Japan, Kyoto Journal and Metropolis.

FARRUKH SALEEM is the Sunday columnist for The News, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily. He writes on conflict dynamics, political economy and governance. His previous positions include national consultant for the World Bank’s Post Conflict Need Assessment, executive director at the Centre for Research and Security Studies, and contributor to the UN-sponsored Common Country Assessment.

KRISHAN PARTAP SINGH is a former banker who now lives and writes in New Delhi. He is the author of The Raisina Series, a trilogy of novels set in Lutyen’s Delhi, India’s seat of power. He can be reached at raisina.series@gmail.com

DILIP D’SOUZA trained in engineering at BITS Pilani, India and computer science at Brown University, USA. He worked in software in the US and India for over twenty years before realizing that writing was his passion. He has published four books and has won several awards for his writing, including the Newsweek and the Daily Beast Prize for South Asia Commentary. He lives in Bombay with his wife Vibha, children Surabhi and Sahir, and cats Cleo and Aziz.

AMIT TAYAL wanted to be an artist since he was nine years old. After a brief shot at accountancy and then animation, he found his niche as an illustrator at Campf ire Graphic Novels in New Delhi.

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JEET THAYIL is a poet, novelist, librettist and musician. His four poetry collections include These Errors Are Correct and English, and he is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. His libretto for the opera Babur in London toured internationally in 2012. He is one half of the contemporary music project Sridhar/Thayil. His debut novel Narcopolis was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. He lives in New Delhi.

SIVAKAMI VELLIANGIRI was included in Dr Srinivasa Iyengar’s History of Indian Writing in English and has published her poems in The Little Magazine, Indian Literature, Kavi, Parampara, Dance Macabre, and elsewhere. Her online chapbook, In My Midriff, was published by Lily Press. Hosted by the Prakriti Foundation she has read her poems at Chamiers, the Semester-at-Sea, and at Spaces. Her poem Kodaikanal won a second prize in the IBPC Poetry Contest.

She is passionate about taking poetry to the young.

SHASHI WARRIER is the author of the thrillers Night of the Krait, The Orphan Diaries and Sniper and the forthcoming Noordin’s Gift. He has also written Hangman’s Journal, a fictional biography of the last hangman of the kingdom of Travancore, and The Homecoming, a novel set in Kashmir. He has written two books for children, The Hidden Continent and Suzy’s Gift. He is currently working on another thriller set in Goa, as well as an account of his motorcycle trip around India.

CHANGMING YUAN is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and co-author of Chansons of a Chinaman and Three Poets. He grew up in a remote Chinese village and published several monographs before moving to North America.

Yuan has a PhD in English and teaches in Vancouver. His poetry has appeared in eighteen countries in 420 literary publications including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, London Magazine, Poetry Kanto, Poetry Salzburg, Taj Mahal Review and Yuan Yang.

ZHANG BINGJIANG was born in Shanghai in 1960 and graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 1982. He was awarded an MFA from the University of South Carolina in 1993 and now lives in Beijing, where he works with film and contemporary art. Zhang has directed and produced numerous films shown at major festivals internationally. His artwork has been displayed and collected widely in China and the US.

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