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    An Eye in the Wall: Short Stories from China
    An Eye in the Wall: Short Stories from China
    An Eye in the Wall: Short Stories from China
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    An Eye in the Wall: Short Stories from China

    By Megan Lee

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    About this ebook

    Award-winning short stories and novella by Megan Lee.

    The short story, "An Eye in the Wall" was first published in The Porter Gulch Review's Spring 2005 edition. “The Sea” won a 1st Place award for Adult Prose presented by poet Billy Collins in the 5th Annual Poetry, Prose & Arts Festival in Pleasanton, CA in April 2006. “Chinese Lesson” and “The Sea” were first published in 2006 in The Homestead Review.

    Cover design by Karen Cruz, 2013.

    The stories take place in and near Xiamen University in Fujian Province, China. The stories and themes are linked, as are the characters, who appear in one as a protagonist and in another as a peripheral character. The points of view shift from Chinese to Westerners, looking in and looking out at each other through the cultural wall that is China.

    Table of Contents:

    Prologue - "The Egret" - the bird of Gulangyu Island
    "Chinese Lesson" - a foreign language student at Xiamen University witnesses an execution convoy
    "An Eye in the Wall" - a young boy's naked body washes up on the beach
    "Good Sam" - a good Samaritan tries to save a beggar's life
    "The Sea" - a prisoner’s last day
    "Seat Number Forty-Four" (a novella) - an old woman from a village in Jiaomei encounters a teenage runaway on a long-distance bus.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMegan Lee
    Release dateNov 23, 2013
    ISBN9781311817686
    An Eye in the Wall: Short Stories from China
    Author

    Megan Lee

    Megan Lee is from Long Island, New York. She has traveled extensively, living and working in England, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Macau, and China for over twenty years as a language teacher and author, while raising her three children overseas. Megan lives in Carmel Valley, CA with her husband, Vladimir, and their Dalmatian, Jerry, and is the founder and editor of the Monterey Poetry Review.Publications:An Eye in the Wall – Short Stories from ChinaAward winning linked short stories by Megan Lee. A language student witnesses an execution, a boy's naked body washes up on a beach, a good Samaritan attempts to save a the life of a beggar, a prisoner’s last day, old woman encounters a teenage runaway on a bus. The points of view shift from Chinese to Westerners, looking in and looking out at each other through the cultural wall that is China.

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      Book preview

      An Eye in the Wall - Megan Lee

      AN EYE IN THE WALL

      Short Stories from China

      Megan Lee

      李玫

      Copyright © 2013 Megan Lee

      Cover design by Karen Cruz

      Smashwords Edition

      License Notes: This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

      Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

      All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

      The short story, Eye in the Wall was first published in 2005 in The Porter Gulch Review. The Sea won 1st Place for Adult Prose in the 5th Annual Poetry, Prose & Arts Festival in Pleasanton, CA in April 2006. Chinese Lesson and The Sea were first published in 2006 in The Homestead Review.

      To my children

      Table of Contents

      Prologue: The Egret

      Chinese Lesson

      An Eye in the Wall

      Good Sam

      The Sea

      Seat Number Forty-Four (a novelette)

      Appendix: Cycle of yearly moons and their corresponding seasons

      Acknowledgments

      I wish to thank Anne Greene, Adjunct Professor of English and Director of Wesleyan University Writing Programs, for her time, valuable suggestions, and encouragement throughout the creation of these stories; Charlotte Currier for her wealth of experience and guidance; Dr. Bill Brown at Xiamen University for information from his book Amoy Magic, USAF Colonel Gene W. Jones and Dr. Vladimir Mylnikov for their editing insights; and Dr. Liao Rongrong and Professor Ma Yibing of DLIFLC for their comments on Chinese culture and language. Many thanks to Karen Cruz (kcruzdesign@gmail.com) for the beautiful cover design derived from an original photo by Andrew Mandemaker posted on Wikipedia in 2004 under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike generic license.

      Notes on Chinese pinyin pronunciation:

      The sound of x is similar to sh in ship, therefore, the pronunciation of Xiamen is similar to Shyah-men.

      The sound of q is similar to ch in cheek, therefore, the pronunciation of qi is similar to chee.

      Prologue

      The Egret

      One golden eye peers through a gap in the low clouds as the egret curves upward, and then levels out of her long ascent from Sunlight Rock on Gulangyu Island to her daily inland circuit of northwestern hills, crossing rivers, forests, and fish farms, unaware of towns or borders. Her home is on the edge of a great round rice bowl shaped land known by its people as Zhong Guo, the country at the center of the earth.

      This morning, the crook-necked egret turns south, following the green peaks. Her slow strong flight catches the winds in a full outstretch of wings, and with a tip of white feathers, she adjusts westward over descending hillsides. The mournful bellows of manacled water buffalo rise from rice paddies that quilt the valleys, stitched with shimmering canals, dirt paths and red bean trees.

      She flies along the coast where red dust and acrid smells are thrown upward by metallic creatures whose backs glare in the mid-day sun, noisy herds never straying off the gray line that bears them north and south, and turns them through Jimei and across the causeway to Xiamen, where they circle the belly of that rotund island.

      Low fat clouds bob over the island like a convocation of Buddhas, their faces enlightened by the upward slant of rays from the sun as it descends into the sea. The egret glides over the botanical gardens and a sprawling monastery with its temples and calligraphic rocks strewn down the hillside like a random spill of dice.

      Next to the monastery, the red-tiled roofs of Xiamen University appear, it’s buildings spaced by tree-lined paths leading from a willow-lined lake, and its borders fully encircled behind protective walls. At the coast, the egret spies the robes of the sea retreating from the shore, exposing it to the early rise of a full moon. The pale purple of evening brings relief to the earth from the heat of the day.

      The egret flies beyond the shore of Xiamen, returning to the smaller island of Gulangyu. Clothed with bougainvillea, the walled dwellings rise and fall with the undulations of the land, and humans amble the snake-like paths between them. Landing in a rock-rimmed mud marsh, she stands still on long black legs until she spies a flash of silver. With a quick pierce her orange beak impales a thrashing fish and she feeds contentedly. Laboring upward again, she arches her wings, slows and hovers to grasp a lofty tree branch near Sunlight Rock, where in quiet and solitude, the egret makes her home.

      Chinese Lesson

      Naomi Levinger killed the shrieking alarm clock and lay back on the cotton wad mattress. Eyes opened. Wall calendar. Xing-qi wu. Friday.

      Naomi dreaded going to class on Fridays. She closed her eyes again and lay in bed for a few minutes listening to the queer hiss of bamboo outside the window of her dorm, a room she shared with a Finnish girl who spoke little English, meditated at 4:00 a.m., and shaved her head twice a week. They talked when necessary, but could communicate only in Chinese.

      Naomi wished she were home. She missed the rustle of a thousand maple leaves outside her bedroom window in Broad Ripple, a suburb of Indianapolis. Mom would be downstairs brewing espresso, and the roastiness of the scent would rouse her for the day. But then, she remembered that it wasn’t morning in Indiana; she had to get up in China while her parents were going to bed on the other side of the world. She turned over and groaned.

      When Naomi woke up the second time she had overslept by three hours and missed her first two classes. She kicked off the quilt, pulled on the heap of denims she had stepped out of at 2:00 a.m. the night before, and bolted downstairs to the lobby of the foreign students’ dorm. Breakfast was a serpentine twist of deep-fried dough and a carton of soy milk that she gulped as she scaled the eighty-two uphill steps to her 10:20 Chinese grammar class at Xiamen University. Her meager meal would stave off hunger for an hour until lunchtime, when she could pamper her stomach at MacDonald’s.

      She raced to the third floor corridor of the Overseas Education Building where she was doing a year of language study as the lone student sent by Butler University’s East Asian Department. Her late arrival created a welcome distraction for the eleven pairs of eyes that watched her shimmy off her backpack and slip into the space between the chair and the desk that were both bolted to a cement floor. Teacher Wang greeted her cheerily from the lectern with a Zao-an, Na-ou-mi (Good morning, Naomi), and then turned to chalk a single Chinese character on the blackboard.

      "This is bi review," Teacher Wang sing-songed in Mandarin as she pointed to the exercise on the board.

      比

      To Naomi, the Chinese character for the word bi looked like the profile of two men sitting in a row, each with a hand and a foot sticking out in front. "Bi is two-piece thing-compare word, the teacher continued. Every-piece student use bi sentence for two-piece thing compare." The grammar of bi as a comparison

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