Watering Heaven
Praise for Watering Heaven:
What’s the meaning of life? Few writers risk asking such a naïve question anymore, but Peter Tieryas Liu’s debut collection probes the membrane of modern meaninglessness in consistently passionate and original prose. With its robust inquiry into “love’s very anatomy,” Watering Heaven underscores the babble of the global village from inside China’s Forbidden City to inside the bacterium of the hand that holds the ubiquitous videogame joystick. Liu showers us with tales of seemingly lost and strange people who could be a lot more like us than we care to admit-- a photographer who collects pieces of humans, a loner who listens to other people’s phone conversations, a politician who tries to stave off a mutant rat rebellion, and a saga of shit-covered shoes. Liu’s brave new world comes at us full-force with a spinning Blade Runner intensity, keeping us guessing as it keeps us on the edge of our postwar, pre-apocalyptic seats. Encore! Encore!
- Leza Lowitz, author of Green Tea to Go: Stories from Tokyo
A surreal menagerie of short stories that sometimes veer into the realm of magic realism, Peter Tieryas Liu’s Watering Heaven explores the lives of those drifting in an existential sea that is our urban post-modern landscape. Whether set in Beijing, L.A., or New York, there is something both slightly haunting yet inviting in these tales of love and loss, connections made and broken, but never forgotten. Mr. Liu displays a deftness in his writing that is both sensitive and intelligent. He’s a writer to look out for.
- Sang Pak, author of Wait until Twilight
Peter Tieryas Liu’s debut short story collection Watering Heaven is edgy, clever, and memorably innovative. He masterfully treats his panoply of characters—an eccentric but lovable production assistant from Shanghai, a photographer of urban legends, a corpulent engineer with the solution to cold fusion, a bacterium spliced into a billion-celled organism called Habit, a failed suicide artist in love with a failed food artist—with a vibrant swirl of wit, compassion, and astonishing respect. Liu’s untainted directness of language, his richness and precision to detail, as well as his surreal brilliance and vulnerability reminds one of the very best of Borges, Calvino, Pynchon. Jolts of spontaneous wisdom, inquiry, as well as ethnic familial tales and euphemisms coming from the mouths of Liu’s heroes and heroines beg the reader to think inward, to test the assumed norms of everyday existence, to aspire to something greater—the unhinged capacity of what is curiously new, prophetically needed. Here is an author who single-handedly breaks the sun in half with sheer novelty and song.
- Leonore Wilson, author of Western Solstice
Peter Tieryas Liu’s ear is expertly attuned to the zeitgeist—the tangle of our social networks, our cubicle culture, the language of science—but the brilliant, haunting stories in Watering Heaven are always leading us somewhere deeper yet: that fathomless reservoir of human need and longing. Like flashing neon signs with some of their letters shorted out, Liu’s characters are sundered, yet continue to function, their messages unmistakable as they urgently attempt to communicate with one another and us, again and again.
- Tim Horvath, Author of Understories and associate Prose Editor for Camera Obscura
Exuberant. Wildly inventive. Grungy, grimy, gritty with global resonance for the 21st century, Watering Heaven boldly treads where devils fear to go. This debut collection of madly manic fiction rides bareback over the rocky metaphysical divide that is Asia (especially China) and the U.S.A. And the journey is bleakly compassionate. These are curious fictions, bordering at times on meditations about the unpredictability and possibility of existence. In particular, the problem of love is always at the forefront, as people meet and part, vanish and return, die and resurrect in a horrific relationship to the blatantly, and even grotesquely, physical. Liu’s protagonists are forever in search of the perfect connection with the partner who will pull them out of their own skins; at times this restlessness is disturbing and weirdly extremist. Yet at the center of each story is a pulsing, beating heart that seems to whisper: try, try, don’t stop trying, heaven is just around the corner. An astonishing energy prevails throughout the collection. This is definitely a writer to watch.
- Xu Xi, Author of Access: Thirteen Tales and Habit of a Foreign Sky
Watering Heaven
By Peter Tieryas Liu
Signal 8 Press
Hong Kong
Watering Heaven
By Peter Tieryas Liu
Published by Signal 8 Press
An imprint of Typhoon Media Ltd
Copyright 2012 Peter Tieryas Liu
ISBN: 978-988-15539-1-1
eISBN: 978-988-15539-5-9
Typhoon Media Ltd: Signal 8 Press | BookCyclone
Hong Kong
www.typhoon-media.com
www.signal8press.com
www.bookcyclone.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for brief citation or review, without written permission from Typhoon Media Ltd.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Cover image: Justin Kowalczuk
Author photo: Angela Xu
Dedicated to Angela Binxin Xu
For changing my life
Table of Contents
Chronology of an Egg
Forbidden City Hoops
The Wolf’s Choice
A Beijing Romance
Rodenticide
Staccato
Gradients
The Political Misconception of Getting Fired
The Buddha of Many Parts
Passing Glance
Searching for Normalcy
The Interview
Urban Dreamers
Cold Fusion
Colony
Unreflected
The Death Artist
58 Random Deaths and Unrequited Love
Resistance
An Empty Page
Publication Credits
Author Acknowledgment
Chronology of an Egg
March 6: I first meet Sarah Chao in Beijing over tequila shots after a game conference. I tell her I think she’s beautiful and she tells me she has an unusual genetic quirk that scares off most men.
“Every time I have sex, I lay an egg.”
I assume she’s joking, get her email address. She’ll be coming out to the States in a few months and we agree to hang out then.
July 8, 7:45PM: Four months later, she’s in LA and I take her out to an exhibition about talented circus performers who’ve died in the act. We eat dinner at a ‘fusion’ restaurant on the Sunset strip, a motley of Asian and South American cuisines which end up tasting like neither.
8:04PM: X-ray profiles: me, Ethan Zhou, game designer, grew up in San Francisco, lived in China for three years researching iguanas and pandas. A previously broken ankle, pinky, and nose are the primary radioactive blips on my scan. Sarah Chao spent half her life in Kentucky, the other half in China. She’s a producer, outsourcing work for an online videogame, has a thick scapula, slender ribs, tender forearm, rounded pelvis, almost perfect mandible—and no broken bones.
9:02PM: As we exit the restaurant, she grabs a marker from her bag and tags a Mandarin character on the wall.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“The food sucked and it’s my duty to warn people.”
I’m not going to argue with her, but her vandalism extends to crowded bars, two empty nightclubs that force everyone to stand in line, and eve
n a drunk guy’s forehead. Please love me, she writes in Mandarin.
“You know what you’re doing is illegal,” I say when she tags four badly parked cars.
“So’s drunk driving,” she replies. “Words should have gravity. If you can’t get arrested for a word, it probably isn’t worth using.”
9:18PM: We wander through Sunset, a plastic-boob-infested cornucopia of shallow snobbiness that doubles as a playground for celebrity wannabes. Paparazzi hound some Asians from a Koreatown-based reality show.
“This is what people in LA aspire to?” she asks.
“Not everyone.”
“What’s your aspiration?”
“In the long run, I’m still trying to make up my mind. But in the short term, I’d really love green tea ice cream.”
9:45PM: Green tea ice cream reminds me of my uncle Stan, who used to be a hippie and flew to China for a cultural exchange through his university more than thirty years ago. He arrived with a massive Afro, sparkling silver suit, and sunglasses bigger than his palm. Unsurprisingly, he was an outcast. A small vendor gave him the idea to start an ice cream store back home and he returned as soon as he could, setting up shop in Monterey Park where I always ordered green tea ice cream.
One lunch, he told me an old Chinese folktale about a fox who fell in love with a prince. The fox begged a powerful spirit to turn him into a human and the spirit agreed in exchange for the fox’s soul. But being mischievous, it turned the fox into a man. When the man tried to express his love for the prince, he was locked away and executed.
My mom told me Uncle Stan shoved a thousand Tylenol pills into his pistachio ice cream (his favorite flavor), and fell into eternal sleep.
“Does that mean you have one eternal dream, or millions of different ones?” I asked.
I don’t remember her answer. But I do remember a stranger who tried to come to the funeral and was turned angrily away by my family. He said, teary-eyed, “I just wanted to say good-bye.”
10:08PM: We meet up with four of my friends who want to go swing dancing at a techno club. Jim and Larry have zoot suits on; Lillian and Suzy are wearing swing skirts and rhinestone brooches. Lillian carries Jim around like an accessory: he loves her but she always plays innocent. Suzy’s dating a guy named Brad Pitt who looks nothing like the actor, while Larry’s one of those unfortunate people who blames his woes on his wife (he’s always telling me not to get married till I’m fifty). All four are great dancers.
I’m mediocre, and that’s being generous.
10:14PM: I comment to Sarah about the epidemic of ordinary people dressing up as superheroes including one in a zoot suit who scares off thieves by blaring on his trumpet. “Who are your superheroes?” I ask.
“Garbage men.”
“Garbage men?”
“Can you image what would happen to society if no one took away our garbage?”
10:33PM: Techno music is blaring; there’s a curtain of zoot suits swerving and veering like acrobats. The mathematics of human bodies equals legions of jitterbugs dancing the lindy hop in tangential algorithms. Jim spins Lillian eight times, skips opposite her. She goes so fast, it’s like the world’s axis has changed and everything’s revolving around her.
10:42PM: I get a vodka on the rocks. Sarah prefers tequila. I down mine and order a double. Someone grabs me from behind. It’s an old friend, Amy. She hugs me, looks scintillating in the rainbow of lights from the strobe. We exchange banalities, I go back to Sarah, and Amy goes back to her army of suitors.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say.
11:18PM: When we step out, Sarah fires up a cigarette. “What’s bugging you?”
“My friend Amy… She used to be married, happiest couple ever. But her husband got skin cancer and passed away. After that, she went crazy and slept with like a hundred guys… I know it’s none of my business, but I just get depressed when I see her…”
She lights up a match, hands it to me.
“Burn your memories away.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Only ‘cause you’re holding on,” she says, then blows out the match in my hands.
12:36AM: Cumulatively, we’ve sucked down fifteen tequila shots. The four dancers decide they want to karaoke in Koreatown. Their favorite place is nearby on Wilshire. The hostess is a lithe Korean girl who has the face of a teenager, the body and dress of a professional hooker. She guides us to our private room. Lillian and Suzy hog the mic; Sarah swings the tambourines. Jim cheers every time Lillian sings, while Larry is gawking out the window at our hostess.
“Wonder what it’d be like one night with her,” he whispers to me. “You could bounce pennies on that ass.”
12:57AM: I’m drunk; Sarah’s drunk and needs another cigarette. We go out for some air. “Two languages I love most are Mandarin and English,” she says as she tags another character on the brick floor. “You realize the first written language was probably by a guy who couldn’t draw? People have been doing graffiti since the beginning of time and there’s languages that we wouldn’t even know about if someone hadn’t tagged all over the temples.”
“When was the first time you did it?”
“My grandpa told me in Manchuria, when the Japanese invaded, the Chinese couldn’t fight back, so they’d write characters on the walls to protest. A lot of innocents died back then, including his brother and his best friend…”
“You were protesting an invasion force the first time?”
She laughs. “One of my junior high teachers accused me of cheating on a test. I was so angry, I tagged bad things about her all over the lockers. I got in big trouble, had to clean the lockers and mop the entire school.”
“No wonder you appreciate garbage men.”
1:07AM: “I got an idea,” she says. “You have a pen and paper?”
I don’t, but we get some from a liquor store. We approach a newspaper box; she pops in a quarter. “Write something,” she commands.
We write about the limits of doubt, the fatigue of joy, how boredom is the culprit of most evils and conspiracies are stupidities justified after the fact. She stuffs the notes into different papers—LA Express with their proffered sex, City Times with local buffoonery.
“I love giving people surprises,” she explains.
1:22AM: While putting in the papers, I brush up against her. Jolts run through me, and I notice her bare neck, her legs under her skirt. She catches my glance but ignores it and says, “C’mon, write more notes!”
1:55AM: After karaoke, our posse hits up a famous joint that serves donuts with yogurt and hot caramel. It’s practically empty. Ten minutes later, throngs of clubbers arrive, desperate guys spurting at the seams, lonely girls wondering if they’ll ever find true love in the throes of drunken bravado.
2:08AM: I really want to kiss Sarah.
“You’re both left-handed,” Lillian marvels.
“Is that special?”
“It means you’re both right-brained!”
My four companions want to go to an underground rave club where they still serve drinks. Sarah says, “I think I’m done for tonight.”
2:45AM: Being drunk always makes me feel a thousand times lonelier than I am, and Sarah looks beautiful as I drive her home.
“I think video games have an inferiority complex,” I tell her when we get to her apartment. “They compensate by trying to make everything look super realistic.”
“Anything wrong with reality?” she asks.
“No no no. I’m just saying—actually, I don’t know what I’m saying.”
She simpers. “Good night.”
“You don’t wanna… I don’t know.”
She looks at me inquisitively.
Say something smooth, be suave, be cool.
“Good night.”
I want to punch my mouth, flush my head down the toilet.
She asks, “You wanna watch a movie?”
I’m through her door before she is.
2:51AM: She shows
me a collection of movies she’s made with friends: Vertigo: The Happy Ending. Romeo and John. Citizen Kane’s Redemption. Peace Club. Planet of the Cats. I pick the Godmother Part One.
2:57AM: She pops popcorn; we sit on her couch, flick the movie on. She says, “Tell me a sad story from your life.”
“You first,” I say.
She thinks about it. “My best friend in college fell in love with her pet guinea pig and decided to marry him. When she told her parents, they had her institutionalized.”
“Wow… That is sad.”
“Your turn.”
My head is a blur. I have a lot of pathetic stories, mishaps, mistakes, acts of stupidity, more rejections than I can remember. I used to stutter like a hyena; I was so pimple-faced, girls refused to talk to me. She’s quiet. I stare at her. She’s looking straight at me. I kiss her. She shakes her head. “We shouldn’t do–” But it’s too late and our lips lock. The sound of violins in the movie are mottled by occasional floods of bullets.
3:31AM: We hold hands after we finish and she says, “Promise you won’t hate me.”
“For what?”
Her forehead is covered with sweat.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I t-t-t…” She lowers her head, gets up and runs for the bathroom.
“Are you okay?”
“No!” she shrieks. “Shit shit shit!”
“Sara–”
“Bring me a pillow, now!”
I grab a pillow from her sofa, hand it to her. She’s naked, arms clutching both walls. “Wait outside.”
“But–”
She’s quaking, she screams, her veins throb. A small protrusion forms near her vagina and splits open. There’s something poking through, and blood covers the surface of the object. She grits her teeth, screams. Goo builds up and there’s a viscous mess. An egg drops on the pillow. She stumbles, takes a deep breath, picks up the egg (which is about three times the size of a normal one), and washes it off in the sink.
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